A Terrible Idea
by Immi
Summary: Ymir's pursuit of the head cheerleader has nothing to do with warm fuzzy feelings or mushy insides or how birds suddenly appear every time she is near. It is purely physical. Obviously. Slowish burn HSAU yumikuri
1. Chapter 1

Ymir was a simple girl with simple observation skills and wants.

Historia Reiss looked hot in a skirt, and she wanted under it.

Not that complicated. Most people with eyes in their school thought along the same lines, only they went and made it weird. They always made it weird. The way to get a girl's attention was not ducking around corners and jamming unsigned letters into her locker. They had four years in this particular hellhole before they moved on to the next one. That wasn't enough time to play out a twenty-season soap opera plot. If you wanted to get down and dirty with someone, you had to jump on them. Carpe diem, seize the day, get in their face and be specific about where you want theirs.

That was the master plan.

No one had time for all the hemming and hawing just getting a conversation started. Ditch that noise and go for the jugular. Screw invisible social boundary lines, if she wanted to talk to a cute cheerleader, all she needed was a pair of lungs loud enough.

There was nothing to it. Get an in, get close, then charm the girl silly until they're making out under the bleachers. No muss, no fuss, and a fuckton of fun.

Porco stared across the cafeteria table at her, mouth in aghast horror, crumpled milk carton and mangled straw passing the most extreme of judgments.

"That," he said, "is not how you do romance."

Ymir held up her hand, resplendently lounged on the opposite bench. Her eyes were perfectly level with the main prep table, where there was so much concentrated blond a legit, ethereal glow shimmered in the air above. The main contributor, esteemed object of all her carnal lust, and perpetual smartphone addict, wasn't in the realm of noticing. Historia never noticed anyone. It was great. While everyone else was busy crying over their castrated egos, only one brave soul remained to swoop in and fill the obvious gap in the queen bee's social life.

Porco was an amateur killjoy still struggling to make it to the majors.

Ymir was a straight-A student with a drama elective. This was her party.

"That's not how _you_ do romance," she corrected. "We're also not doing romance, here."

"We are not a we."

"We're not?"

A tray clacked down next to Porco's spot, freezing him and gaining their table three levels of respectability. Pieck maneuvered her crutches around the bench smoothly, sighing.

"That's a shame. We've all been getting along so well lately."

Making the grave mistake of counting his best friend as an ally in his misguided quest, Porco puffed up his chest and sharpened up his glower. Like immediately scooting over and being primed to say thank you if one of the crutches clubbed him in the head didn't mark him as a pushover. He said, as ominously as Tree #3's understudy, "Ymir wants to bang a cheerleader."

"Does she?" Pieck popped the lid off her pudding. "Good for her."

Ymir offered Pieck a thumbs up before pretending Porco had enough of her attention to deserve a response. "See? This is what being supportive looks like."

Porco ignored her. "No, _not_ good for her. She's after the pod person."

Locking him in the A/V club room on movie day couldn't just be good for a laugh, could it? He had to be a nerd about it. Ymir rolled her eyes. "Like being an alien replacement makes her any less hot."

"Oh, Historia? We were lab partners last year." Pieck craned her neck over to share Ymir's sightline. She slurped her milk calmly. Observing the popularity black hole for a solid few seconds that should've been spent not eyeing Ymir's girl, she said, "She has marvelous bone structure."

Those capillaries in Pock's cheeks were not going to make it to middle age. "She's a cheerleader who doesn't know how to smile."

That was the truest fucking truth to enter the school's halls since conception. Every routine, without fail, the second Historia transferred in, was missing one important—doubtless _radiant_ —smile. The haze of the field lights and the regular chanted cheers tried to hide it, but they fell shorter than Jaeger's football tryout.

Ymir had a bet going with herself that the only reason Historia joined up was so no one would bitch about her being an ice queen. Everyone knew that pretty blonde cheerleaders were happy about everything. Absolutely everything. They were built to bleed glitter.

Historia had been staring at her phone for the last five minutes with the same deadeye stare, ignoring every sparkly, peppy person in her vicinity with such palpable force that Ymir didn't know how they didn't all puff into dust. There was a goddess among them, and she had no time for wimpy mortals.

Ymir had been accused of a demonic, corrupting presence since she was five. Mortality was for losers.

"It's freaky."

Hell, had Pock kept talking?

Ymir shrugged. The bench rolled her shirt uncomfortably. "Biblically, angels are supposed to be terrifying," she said.

"She's not terrifying, just creepy and weird."

"I'm sure they had that rep, too."

"She's also not an angel," Porco bit out. He was in the unfortunate stage of his life where his voice was refusing to take puberty's suggestion to stop cracking.

"Then explain how every time she walks by I have a religious experience."

"Are you fucking—"

Pieck interrupted what was surely going to be an epic comeback, full of broiling puritan indignation. "Her uncle was arrested last year for starting a cult."

Ymir lifted her head off the bench. She looked at Pieck. Porco probably hadn't stopped since she sat down, but he was usually more subtle about how far down his jaw slipped. Pieck continued to slurp her milk.

"They let him go," she added helpfully.

While Porco rediscovered words and mumbled about the normally very appealing part of that (the Reiss family had more money than most countries—busting a cult leader or two free was child's play), Ymir focused on the important things.

"Where'd you hear about that?" she asked.

"I told you," Pieck said, smiling serenely. "We were lab partners."

Ymir's interest rose with her hackles. "She talked to you?"

"Not especially. But it's hard to spend time with someone without deepening your relationship." She sent a brighter smile Porco's way, and he blushed. Because they were disgusting. With whatever perverse goal she deemed a success in that flyby interaction tallied and notched, she turned back to Ymir. "You don't have any classes with her, do you?"

Ymir slumped back on her bench. Her arms folded over her chest. Letting them dangle to the floor meant that her fingers would touch the infested linoleum. "I'm on the honor roll. The only people I have classes with are dorks."

"And you're both heading home early today."

If she were Pock, she would complain about being grouped up with him. For the continued joy of everyone, she had more class. She complained about their landlord. Foster parent of the decade was ditching them to go on some nature hike with a felon he'd hooked up with, and they had to make nice with his sister before he was all the way out the door.

She watched Historia's legs cross themselves under her table. How was that legal.

Pieck's traded her carton out for her untouched pudding. Licking the spoon thoughtfully, she said, "I suppose this is your only chance to talk to her today."

Ymir's crossed arms bulged a little. Marcel's barbells came in handy for some things. She could see Porco perk up out of the corner of her distracted eye.

"Yeah," she said, "so?"

"So you're sitting over here," Porco said. "Not talking to her. When you said this was going to be _simple_."

"It is going to be simple." Had they seen her? Either of them? It was going to be the easiest thing in the world. Even if anyone was blind enough to call themselves competition, the intimidation factor was playing in her favor all day long. Historia sitting at a crowded table full of sycophants, a whole room of people staring at her, could go a whole lunch hour without the burden of a single conversation.

She'd never be expecting Ymir to waltz in.

"I'm sure she would welcome your company," Pieck said kindly. Porco snorted.

"Damn straight," Ymir said.

"If only lunch didn't end in forty minutes."

"Where'd your manners go? Interrupting people while they eat is rude." Historia had inhaled her lunch in the first five minutes. She looked pretty consumed with her phone, though. What kind of jerk got in the way of that? There was a lot of behavior people as stunning as her could get away with, but taking advantage of that was wrong. Wasn't that what Pock kept railing on about?

Pieck sighed. "I suppose you two are doomed to wait for another day. Fate can be cruel."

Six tables away, Historia tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Shining like the sun and blinding everyone in the building. Ymir was the only one to keep her eyes wide open, following that magic hand lingering in the air before it dropped back to her phone.

All she had to do was walk over and say something.

Simple as fuck.

But as like… a tomorrow thing.


	2. Chapter 2

There was one very, very important thing to consider in all of this.

Porco had no business bitching about her preferences when he was the one responsible for bringing Historia up on her gaydar.

She'd been fine with her life. Pretty new face transfers in? Whatever. Paying attention to what was above a cheerleader's neck was not how you paid attention to cheerleaders. They did gymnastics all day. Pretty faces were maybe their fifth best feature on a good day, and good luck trying to tell those legs apart. If the school ever got investigated for a secret cloning operation, no one would waste time defending them. They'd all finally understand why the halls were full of crap instead of something decent.

Take the locker that started it all.

See, Porco liked to make her life difficult. Would he ever admit that? No. That would fall under the category of easing her pain and suffering. Also known as his one major turnoff.

Other things that didn't turn Pock off included one Reiner Braun. Quarterback, dreamboat to all those sexually curious and frustrated, and that one asshole who'd kept Porco off the football team for the rest of his life, do you want to hear all about how he's an asshole one more time because I feel bad about whining to Pieck about it, Ymir? Do you, do you?

Ymir hadn't wanted to hear about it once.

Porco hadn't cared.

He liked Pieck too much to contribute to her misery, and had too much of a big brother complex to let Marcel know how badly he wanted to punch his perfect teammate's teeth in. Or the other things he obviously wanted to do to Reiner's body.

That left Ymir the sole recipient of all his cliché quarterback woes.

Rough translation?

"Reiner's such a prick, waah waah waah, I want him to hold me in his big strong arms."

Repeat a dozen times a week for maximum effect.

Putting up with this crap was going to get her canonized. The only thing worse than Porco being all hung up on the single most teenager crush he could have come up with was his insistence on upping the ante even more by claiming she was delusional and seeing things. Because crushing on the quarterback was one high school dream, but doing it while making furry friends in Narnia?

Life goals. All the way.

Once upon a time, say near the end of last school year, this led them to Reiner's locker.

Ymir, picture of dignity, was crouched next to it, expertly maneuvering a hairclip to unlock this cave of untold wonders.

Porco, crouching next to her even though he was literally doing nothing helpful, was judging. Even then.

"How have you not ended up in juvie?" he hissed, probably still on the furtive lookout for teachers. "This is taking forever. It's a cheap school locker."

Ymir kept her focus on her work. "Being picked with a cheap hairclip you grabbed off the ground. This thing is going to break if I go any faster." The usual clicking noises she was going for sounded more like a crying toothpick before it snapped. She gave the tired clip a little more tenderness. "But go ahead, keep complaining. That'll speed me right up."

Pock made some type of noise between a huff and a groan, but he stepped back, and didn't give in to his inner stress goblin and start pacing the halls. If only all partners in crime were so accommodating. It didn't make up for getting her into this mess, but at this point, she'd take what she could get.

Flecks of dirt were floating off the inside of the lock. She didn't know if that meant the hairclip was going to make the upgrade to usable, or if the dirt was the only thing holding it in one piece.

She could have been skiving off with Connie and some brownies.

Finding something good in the library.

Joining the betting pool on when Levi was getting outed as a serial killer.

Anything.

Bottom line, breaking into someone's locker for a pen just wasn't Ymir's idea of a good time. This was all Porco. No one sane would have picked this track on the choose-your-own-adventure playlist. Even Pock usually had the principles to keep his poor tastes in check.

But _Pieck_ gave him the pen. That changed everything. Obviously. They weren't just breaking into the quarterback's locker to avoid having a conversation with him because he made Pock feel tingly in spots that health class should've explained to him. They were breaking into the quarterback's locker because the other perpetrator of tingly feelings gave young Porco a present.

It was a fucking pen. If he had any real attachment to it, he should have said something when Reiner asked to borrow it instead of spluttering like a teenage boy with the second most obvious crush in history. Now first prize had them breaking out the misdemeanors. During class like regular punks, for once.

Ymir didn't know how Porco wasn't getting called on that. She'd gone the practical route and finished her math test early. No one cared about what students did once the agenda of the hour got a giant checkmark next to it. A square like Porco wasn't going to be used to coloring outside the lines. His stroke of criminal genius was probably something like asking for a bathroom pass and expecting her to pick the lock before anyone missed him.

Which wasn't a bad bet, normally.

When she wasn't trying to work with a kit that was half dead on arrival.

Something under her very clever fingers gave out, and it wasn't the lock.

"Fuck."

Porco spun around. "What did you do?"

Ymir held up the half of the hairclip that hadn't dropped to the floor. "Reached the end of this thing's lifespan." She twirled it in disgust. "I think you're out of luck, Pock. You're gonna have to talk to the guy."

That wasn't going to be an okay solution anytime this century, so Porco went back to crouching next to her, frowning at the broken pick like he knew enough about breaking into things to offer an intelligent suggestion.

"The art room has some pieces of wire that would fit. Hard stuff. We could also go easy and grab a few paperclips," he said. Avoiding all mention of rational solutions like conversation. And she thought the way he got around Pieck was bad. It didn't get much simpler than stringing a few words together.

Ymir shrugged. "Be my guest if you want to get caught cutting class. Mr. Zacharias has a second set of eyes up his nose."

Porco's jaw did that thing Pieck always cited as one of the leading causes of tension headaches. When she said things like that, he relaxed. Ymir didn't see fetching the same outcome.

"It's not like you won't have a chance to ask for it back," she said. "Mr. Star Quarterback's always hanging around Marcel. He'll probably follow him home one of these days."

And as the record clearly showed, if Porco had just listened to that advice in the first place, they wouldn't be standing in the empty hallway, jamming broken hairpins into people's lockers. They wouldn't have given the one other person out and about during class a reason to stop, look upon their misguided lawbreaking, and for the only time that year, show an interest in what another human being was doing.

Porco didn't listen to her. Ever. It was like a curse.

Except for this one time. This one time, when she was in a place she didn't want to be, doing something she didn't want to be doing, there was a witness.

"That isn't the quarterback's locker."

A total _babe_ of a witness.

It could have been a slowmo horror movie, from how Porco jumped, and maybe it was, but one of those ones where the victim gets raunchily seduced for their blood or heart or some other miscellaneous anti-virgin sacrifice thing. Horror movies didn't invest in elevens just for kicks.

Twelves.

This girl was a twelve.

Ymir did not have a cheerleader thing. Having eyes and making use of them, sure. She could dig the lung capacity and athleticism, and she wasn't gonna say a word against the only good part about football games Porco dragged her to. But pompoms, hair ribbons, and teeth that qualified as a blinding hazard weren't her type.

She also didn't know Historia was a cheerleader at the time.

So it was not a cheerleader thing.

It was a blonde-hot-in-a-skirt-skin-skin-boots-eyes-that-could-skewer-a-battleship thing. Reserved for a party of one, standing in the middle of the hallway, hall pass dangling off _enticingly_ tapered fingers while the world swung around to adjust for the arrival of its new queen. The flickering ceiling lights draped over her bare shoulders like a mantle of holy fuck, blue eyes deep enough to drown in keeping Ymir lost at sea.

This was the kind of girl you used please with before asking her to step on you.

Lesser blonds of a louder nature spoke up. "It's not?"

The unnamed Historia shook her head with such minimalist flair that you could almost hear the court herald shouting for Porco's dismissal. Even with him speaking, he wasn't the one she was looking at. She only had eyes for the girl kneeling before her, broken hairclip in hand, who had just seconds ago been trying to break into her locker.

She didn't look like she minded.

Ymir wasn't going to convince her to start. Standing up to her full height, she ditched the hairclip in her pocket and slouched against the row of lockers. "So," she said, with a crack in her voice that dove past nerdy and hit husky, "you know which one of these belongs to him?"

That hand that was crossed over her waist let a finger loose to point at the one behind Ymir's head. It was like she was jabbing her entire vagus nerve in the throat, but unlike some people, Ymir knew how to play it cool. She turned to Porco and winked. An extra spasm in her free eye followed along. "What do you know, problem solved."

With that look on his face, it was like he knew his problems were just getting started. So if he tried to argue that she'd thrown this at him out of nowhere, he had only his habitual repressed denial to blame, and that was on years of therapy to work out, not Ymir.

"Except for the part where we still need to open it," he said. His nervousness in the face of failure had gone back to its default irritation. The other half of the broken hairclip lay glittering on the linoleum.

She leaned further back against the lockers, careful not to cringe when her skull banged into the lock in need of her attention. She grinned cockily at her belligerent accomplice. "That is what you brought me along for, or did you forget?"

Boots squeaked across the floor. Ymir kept her smile fixed. Porco kept up looking like all the psychic agony of his inability to deal with this himself was just starting to hit home. Pieck would've been on him about his jaw again.

It was a sign of the world knowing what she had to put up with in its encompassed territory that let her eyes wander at just the right moment to watch undesignated hot girl reach into her waves of lustrous blonde hair, splashing tresses over her shoulders, and pull out a hairpin.

She tapped it against Ymir's elbow. Probably harder than she intended to. A jolt like that belonged to a bad move with a funny bone.

Ymir was going to reach out and take it after she gave the girl enough time to really think about what she was doing. The time it took her hair to settle should be about enough. Fate was even kind about letting Ymir know when that was, bouncing the light off every gleaming strand. There was nothing wrong with taking your time.

Porco made a very unpleasant noise and yanked the hairpin out of the girl's hand. "Thanks," he said, scowling at Ymir and clapping her new equipment into her hand.

Ymir rolled her eyes back, and was in the midst of composing a way better thank you when the girl started walking away without a word. Just like that. Down the hall with her pass still swinging from her fingers.

That was what settled it. The Moment.

She and that girl were going to go at it, raunchy horror movie style.

All Pock's fault.

If he ever got his head out of his ass, maybe she'd even thank him for it.

For now, she'd gotten him his damn pen back, hadn't she?


	3. Chapter 3

Ymir always stayed late after school. Marcel had football, Porco had fretting over Marcel and football, and by the time they were ready to tromp their way home, they were both tired enough to walk into mailboxes. Someone had to make sure they made it back with pictures when it finally happened.

Usually that meant hanging out in the library and knocking her homework out of the park. Their household had a strict no fun policy until schoolwork was finished up—or until they learned to lie about it well enough to get away with doing nothing.

Their foster warden was a human lie detector. It was fucking annoying. He had the same thought, only regarding teenagers. One day they were all going to wake up with their organs in coolers.

Today, Ymir was staying late after school with a mission. The same mission she'd had for a week, all of her so-called friends kept pointing out. Like taking her time and knowing what things and people were worth her patience was some kind of personality defect.

Historia was on the level of putting up with watching cheerleaders practice for two hours every single day. If they couldn't see that, that just meant better odds for her.

The only problem so far was that the other cheerleaders could see Ymir. They weren't the fans of her afternoon habits that she was of theirs, so instead of getting to rest on the bleachers like a normal person, she had the dubious pleasure of running laps until she looked less like a public nuisance. All because cheerleaders had egos the size of the whole football field, so couldn't get it through their thick skulls that maybe she was only after one of them. Say, the one who _didn't_ get all weird and bothered by someone actually watching their performance art.

Rounding the final stretch of her last mile before a break, she had to give the world some credit for being predictable. Continual punishment for having taste was just the kind of justice the damn place got off on.

Her cheap sneakers were giving her blisters, the field was an inch away from being reclassified as a lake in all of the corners precious football stars weren't scrimmaging in, the sun was beating up on her head instead of dealing with that, and Marcel kept smiling and waving every time she passed him. One time as he was tackling someone.

It was a very earthy sort of hell for an angel's domain.

Ymir tromped her way off her beaten swamp path and over to where Pieck was sitting on the bleachers with several towels. She was giving every impression of being occupied by the clouds, but she handed Ymir one without being asked.

"Our track team would do better if more people ran away from their problems so literally," Pieck said.

Ymir grabbed one of the water bottles she'd nicked off Porco and poured it over her head. She was so hot steam was coming off her, and not for reasons she was okay with. Jabbing her thumb over her shoulder with vigor, she said, "My problem's right over there, and I was running back to her."

"That's a surprising level of maturity from you."

"Glad somebody finally noticed," Ymir said, plopping down on the bleachers. She reached over Pieck and stole another towel for her hair. Pieck took that as a sign to use her as a damp cushion.

No one left on the field paid them any attention. This was the one time a day you could say that about Porco. Pieck had his full concentration whenever she so much as breathed in his presence. She did that a lot. The opposite was debatable. Right now he was forty yards downfield and watching Marcel play so intently it made his little side glances at Reiner almost disappear. He'd be thrilled, he could blame his red face on stress.

Ymir was not out in the hot sun because of Porco's issues.

Also ignoring them was the squad of cheerleaders, placed in front of the other side of the bleachers and building pyramids out of people. Historia was on top. If this was the only context she ever thought that in, she was going to die sad.

Ymir had never been that enchanted with gymnastics. Leotards and breaking her skull open doing flips on a beam while a crowd of very bored people watched? Half of that came close to sounding cool. That was the part of her brain talking that'd be lucky to be salvaged if it got its way. She kept her athletics simple. Running, because there was always something to run from, and the occasional weightlifting, because there was always someone who deserved a punch, and Kenny said if she was going to punch people who deserved it, they'd better not be getting up to punch back. Whatever PE thought mattered covered everything else. How other people got their kicks was for bored Sunday gossip sessions when nothing was on TV. It usually wasn't that interesting.

She was going to pin the blame for that on past subjects.

Historia could _move_. Flips, spins, handstands. It was like watching a ribbon of light unspool. The choreography sucked, but the body putting it into motion was a work of art, and knew damn well what it was about. Every beat and pause of tension flowed into the next, bare arms and legs keeping each individual flex visible.

This was the kind of poetry missing in AP Lit.

No wasted movements, just sailing through the air and showing off every inch of that perfect skin and muscle, golden hair floating a second behind with a flourish. All without so much as a glimmer of a smile. Historia looked like she was doing this in her sleep, even when the world jacked up its rotation for a second and stilled when she locked eyes with Ymir.

Ymir's hair was dripping on her gym shorts. She still had a hand in her hair with the towel.

That look put her heart through its paces better than all the running got anywhere close to. Was plastic surgery for fucking eyes a thing for rich people? There was no way that shade of blue was natural.

Historia and her damn pretty bored eyes didn't look away. Ymir had to, because a hot cheerleader girl was dropping into the most perfect split ever like it was nothing, and the universe was cursed enough without denying the holy picture of Historia spread on the ground, eyeing Ymir and glowing with heat.

This _girl_. Ymir didn't know what sacrilegious arrangement let the stars align for them to be in shouting distance of each other while they were both single, but she owed it a fruit basket.

"Snaccy," Pieck said.

Ymir absently smacked Pieck with her dampened towel. "No one asked for your opinion."

"That doesn't strike you as a mistake?"

Back to cartwheels. Who scripted this crap? "Get your own or get lost," Ymir said.

Pieck sighed heavily while Historia's eyes found some blade of grass to be their next oh-so-very compliant victim. "How ever am I to move?" she asked. "My crutches are all the way over there, and my poor, ailing body can only go so far."

Ymir would have rolled her eyes if they weren't busy with rediscovering the meaning of life.

The first thing Pieck did every afternoon, once she'd finally made her way over to the bleachers and sat down, was toss her crutches out of arm's reach so Porco would have to bend down and pick them up for her later. When he inevitably walked over to say hi in between being School's Best Water Boy. Ymir hung out with thirsty weirdoes.

A shrieking whistle pierced the air, and the show on the field came to a halt. Cheerleader bodies not belonging to Historia stepped in front of her, heading over to their bags and water. Historia slid back into her line of sight more slowly, moving like a human again instead of a deity.

To a point. Humans did not come that perfect looking. They just didn't.

"Oh, another glaring opportunity to talk to her," Pieck said. "I do wonder what will conspire to interfere this time."

Historia reached her bag without anyone bothering her, and her phone snapped into her hand like a magnet. Ymir nudged Pieck off her shoulder and stood up, grabbing one of the other water bottles she'd snagged when Porco wasn't looking. "School's Best Water Boy," was a failed exaggeration.

"No interference," Ymir said, draping her towel over her shoulder and saluting. Her hand was still a little twitchy from all the adrenaline. From running. "Just needed some time to warm up the spotlight for the big moment."

"Good luck," Pieck called out needlessly as Ymir strutted off.

Her legs were still as consistent as a balloon animal's, but she was ditching the wrong friend for sympathy points there. Besides, that was the kind of thinking of lesser humans who let things get in the way of them and Historia Reiss's attention. She didn't need luck, just a few words and her pretty face. Her—she might add—very pretty face. Her hair looked killer wet.

Sauntering over to the herd of chattering cheerleaders, they parted like the Red Sea, opening the way to Ymir's promised land in no time flat. Social scorn had never gone in her favor before, and if this was a sign of things to come, she'd have to spend more of her downtime annoying cheerleaders.

With an exception for the one she was seducing.

Historia, glued to her phone, didn't yet know what excitement the world had in store for her. She was also so lacking in spatial awareness that it was one more miracle to tick off that she was capable of performing her superhuman feats of coordination on the field. Ymir couldn't see whatever it was the expensive paperweight had to offer that was so enthralling, but she was confident that it couldn't compete with her.

What she needed was Historia to look up for enough seconds to agree with that score. Easy.

Palms still sweating from the blazing heat, Ymir ran her opening line through her head once or twice. Not all drama needed a stage, but rehearsal was a must for impact.

She slung one hand around her towel and held out the water bottle five inches away from Historia's very lovely face.

"Shouldn't a girl as hot as you know a thing or two about staying hydrated?"

Oscar-worthy brilliance. The only way to kick off the start of the rest of her life.

Historia's busy fingers stopped tapping and scrolling for the barest fraction of an instant, and that was what Ymir was going to call a win. The quick flicker of almost eye contact was even better. She sidled closer, enjoying the invisible bubble of privacy that Historia's disposition and her own charm had cast around them.

"I was going to give you the hairpin back," she said, fricking hands starting up the adrenaline trembles all over again, "but it's the best lockpick I own. Supporting you in your criminal activities felt like the next best thing."

There it was. Historia looked up fully from her phone, her beautiful pair of blues losing their hardness in confusion. Ymir had forgotten how cute she could be with her hair up from this distance. Nice complement to the untouchable goddess look she had going for her the rest of the time.

"What criminal activities?" Historia asked, the picture of someone who had never once aided and abetted breaking into the quarterback's locker.

Ymir gestured haphazardly at Historia's uniform, very casually timing it with a lingering look at the assets it left covered and un-. "You are slaying out there."

Sustained eye contact for over ten seconds. This was what dreams were made of. Missing the fuck-me-now attraction, but those dreams were worth a wait for their full production. Baby steps.

Ymir waggled the water bottle at her dream girl a little more insistently. "Heat stroke's a real problem with student athletes," she said. Pieck liked reciting medical facts with questionable verifiability during lunch. She'd picked it up sometime after Reiner ruined Pock's chances of joining the football team and he was getting pissy over no one pretending to be sad that only one Galliard was destined for brain damage. There was a good chance that it was all bullshit, but it was useful bullshit.

Whatever Historia thought about it stayed a mystery thanks to her untested talent in facial expressions, which was absolutely fine. Unwrapping all that would take an eternity that Ymir wasn't too interested in fielding so fast in this process, or ever. Feelings were nothing but boring trouble.

Still, it was hard not to feel a little something when a whole damn hand let go of the phone to take the proffered bottle. Grabbing the cap, and eliminating any chance of their fingers touching, but they were both covered in sweat, anyway, as evidenced by Historia's maintained glow. On at all times, day and night, but sometimes it really was natural. Porco's alien theory continued to be massively flawed.

Historia was anything but boring.

"So," Ymir said, gaze firmly on the bob of Historia's throat while she drank, "we should hang out."

Simple as _fuck_.

Historia lowered the bottle. Her tongue slipped along the edges of her lips, licking away the leftover drops of water. "Why?"

Basic relationship philosophy said that the only way to answer that was the pure, unvarnished truth. Something poetic about Historia's inhuman beauty and great legs. Impressively great legs. It wasn't like there was much there to work with. She was a tiny work of art, and just looking at her made the heat from the sun feel like a gentle tickle.

Then there was the hair, and those eyes, and it was all playing back on pure memory, because Ymir wasn't finding a very compelling reason to look away from her lips.

Politeness dictated words should be coming out of hers faster than they were.

"You clearly can't look after yourself." Ymir's oddly limp hand tapped the bottom end of the bottle for emphasis. "You could use someone like me to lend you a hand. I'm resourceful. Plus, my brother's the best water boy in the whole damn school, so that's an easy in."

Historia's eyebrows rose. Barely, but it qualified as an expression.

"Foster brother," Ymir corrected hurriedly. She ruffled her hair with her towel. "These good looks are one of a kind in this generation."

A remark like that should have come with progress. A keystone of clear development one way or the—okay, being real, there was no way Ymir was striking out here. So there would be some awkward not-smile, or a blush, or shyness, or righteous agreement—

The whistle blew again, and Historia's attention zoomed back to her love affair with her phone before they were forced into cruel separation. Ymir's main competition was an electronic rectangle with a smiley face sticker planted on it. If it wouldn't permanently destroy her chances, she would consider smashing the thing outside of daydreams.

Ymir knew enough sports freaks to recognize her cue to back away, though. No matter how badly the timing worked for her. She did her gentlemanly diligence of waiting for the return of the bottle, keeping the window of opportunity nicely open for staring at Historia's restrained profile, but this day's seizing time was up unless she wanted to put in a few more miles around the field. Which would take away from the strong second impression she had going for her. Now was obviously the stage of building up some sweet anticipation for next time.

The handoff had Historia's hand brushing hers over the cheap plastic.

With eye contact.

Ymir was going to be digging her crappy sneakers into the mud until the sun went down.


	4. Chapter 4

Schools liked to act like they cared about their students.

They didn't, but try explaining that and the loudest thing for miles would be some school counselor asking why it is that schools suck, and sweetheart, are you being bullied? Meanwhile five periods went by, and everything of educational value was lost. Finding that upsetting was considered grounds for another session a week later. Because wanting to talk about feelings was so _normal_.

Ymir had her doubts that anyone believed that. Including the counselor. What really mattered was that if she ran off and did something scandalous, no one could say the school hadn't put in the bare minimum token effort to prevent such behavior.

Looks were everything. With that checked off, the freedom to do whatever the hell you want rang.

Historia got that. One more infernally attractive factoid about her. Ymir was still working her way up to being whatever the hell, so hot cheerleader's current shtick mostly involved her phone— but damn if she didn't make the most of it. While a grand total of no one pointed out that the school goddess was about as interested in them and their anything as any real god had to be.

It was all about appearances. Historia's went way further than her skirt length, which was the multifold brand of luck that had people on the other side of the planet dying for the sake of balance.

Ymir knew all about appreciating a master at work. She spent most of her time being one.

So when the school set out neat, orderly guidelines about where their beloved sheeple were allowed to be during lunch hour, whatever. If they wanted to pretend they had a say in where the cool kids sat, Ymir was willing to work with it. All it took was finding the right prop.

Some people, like Porco's delinquent friend, went old school and paid in full for their gear. No one was going to mess with the kid who brought a knife to school when that kid was Annie. As long as good ol' cousin Levi wasn't around, she had a permanent hall pass with edges sharp enough to kill a man. Several, if the rumors had any truth to them.

Porco needed to hang around better influences.

Ymir, she went classic.

She tucked a manila folder under her arm and went right out the front gate.

Very official, very unlikely to get the cops called, and innocuous enough that the idiot in the suit didn't so much as glance up when she snapped a picture of him lighting up a cigarette on school grounds. All-star dad had some intense thoughts on what he'd do to them if they ever got their phones confiscated, so Pieck had charitably donated hers to the cause.

Ymir, primo messenger girl on a mission, didn't waste her time on the private eye spiel begging to be played out. One hour a day, she got to share a room with an undersexed goddess. She wasn't going to offer more of her precious seconds up to the altar for cheap drama. The planned set was bad enough.

Keeping the folder on obvious display, she walked across the parking lot.

The suit, peasant name Ralph (he wore a _nametag;_ a collar must have had too much dignity), didn't catch on fast. He looked up eons too late to change his fate, Ymir sliding easily into his hazy view. His shiny silver lighter glinted in his hand like it knew it was never going out of style while Ralph scowled like he knew he couldn't say the same.

"School's that way, kid."

This was going to be a fucking treat.

"Smoking's really bad for your health," Ymir said, keeping up a smile for her new friend. She drew Pieck's phone with a flourish, flicking over to its latest digital addition. "Maybe not as bad as this, though."

Ralph's scowl added a pulsing vein or two, and a swell of panic. Ymir sat back on the beautifully waxed hood of the nearest car. His car. This guy had never had a bright idea in his life, thank fuck. Ymir made a show of craning her neck to examine the evidence. "Would you look at that. Right in front of the school sign. Way to earn that street cred."

Never let it be said that the Reiss family hired people who couldn't understand blackmail.

With what they got up to, that was probably one of the top things they looked for, even if they neglected things like enough common sense to avoid lawbreaking when they were on the clock.

Ralph looked like he was rediscovering the part of him that was okay with murder. "What," he asked, "do you want?"

Ymir grinned at her new bestie. "You're Historia Reiss's driver, right?"

* * *

If there was anything you learned from sharing a house with a jock and his helicopter brother, it was getting up at the crack of dawn for things that made no sense.

"Hey, Historia!"

Ymir was finally finding it in her to forgive them for that.

The early morning sun flattered Historia's figure just as well as the other times of day, perfecting her halo hair and bringing new light to the sheen of sweat cheerleading practice always gifted her with. All the shifting hours brought out were fifty new shades of gorgeous, and a touch of drowsiness to go with the death in her eyes.

All while she waited by the locker room instead of heading in. Because when Ymir said her name, she stopped. Easy peasy lemon fucking squeezy.

Like the smile Ymir felt stepping up with the butterflies. She kept a lid on it. There wasn't much she could do about a person being a walking aphrodisiac, but if she was going to return the favor, she couldn't go around with dopey hearts in her eyes. Major turnoffs like that were why Porco was still a virgin. She was on the charm and swag track, not the loser romantic track.

Dialing it up a notch, she winked at Historia and held out the fruits of her labor.

"Thought you could use a pick-me-up before school," she said. "A pretty girl like you should always have something to snack on."

One vending machine granola bar, as sponsored by Ralph. Cheap, probably not poison, and most importantly, something that Historia liked that wasn't her phone. Other options included watered down sports drinks and vitamin water. Ymir was now the proud owner of a list of acceptable flavors for every consumable Historia tolerated—along with the confirmation that servants were basically paid stalkers. Bunch of creeps.

Historia took the candy bar with a hesitation so slight it belonged in a casino. Points to Ralph.

"Do you blackmail people often?"

Fuck Ralph.

"It's more of a trading favors deal," Ymir said. She sprawled a hand on her hip. "I offer to cover for someone, they owe me, I let them know how to clear the debt." Nowhere in the process was procuring a new debt mentioned. That little thing the Reisses should seriously consider screening for was supposed to keep that from happening.

Schooling her expression like a boss a few pay grades behind the light of her life, she kept the next conversation piece relaxed. "He told you about it?"

Historia shrugged. "He thought you were trying to poison me."

She peeled back the wrapper and took a bite of granola.

Blue eyes left laser etchings in Ymir's pupils, and just what the fuck. What the fuck bound this person to a human form, and could she get its number next. Hell, she should have bargained with Ralph for Historia's from the start. Maybe her to-do list needed an upgrade from its one item generalization.

"Not," Ymir said, "my first plan for your body."

Historia bit off another piece. Ymir's shoes dug into a crack in the pavement. Blinking was slowly earning an urban legend tally. There really was something about those damn eyes. They weren't so bleary now. There was almost a spark looking back at her. Art appreciation wasn't a course Ymir had plans to bother with, but this moment was making it rain college credits.

"You could have asked," Historia said abruptly.

Ymir's eyebrows popped up. It took a herculean effort to remember that they were back to talking about the Ralph factor and keep her mouth from going full lewd. She should have gotten a drink while she was at the vending machine. "What, you? You take requests?"

Historia shrugged again, popping the last bit of the bar into her mouth. "Yours, maybe."

She turned around and walked into the locker room.

Ymir stood still.

For a while.

A heart-throbbing, transcendent while.


	5. Chapter 5

"What do you mean you don't have her number?"

It had to be tiring, having your voice crack that much. Ymir looked up from her phone and cast an annoyed look at Porco, who had dropped the pants he was darning to better express how dismayed he was—again—by her lust life. He got annoyed when she called it that, too. He needed something better to do.

"What do you care?"

Porco turned his horror to Pieck, who was providing a much greater service to the community with her needlework. "How long have they been hanging out now?"

"Going on several weeks," Pieck said. "It's very sweet."

"And she still doesn't have the girl's damn phone number?"

"That would allow the phone an unfair display of dominance in the war for Historia's heart."

Porco snorted. Ymir balled up one of the socks she'd repaired earlier and threw it at his head instead of dignifying Pieck's slander. "You both realize I'm sitting right here. If you want to know something, you could try talking to me instead of playing gossiping grandmas."

"Why would we ever want to do that?" Porco asked. He jabbed his needle through the pair of pants he was supposed to be fixing. He was lucky he didn't want to be a doctor. His patient was bleeding out so fast its zipper was going to start squealing for a mercy kill any second.

Ymir swiped her phone screen back to the Facebook page that had inspired his meaningless contribution to her life.

 _Historia Reiss_  
 _\+ Add Friend_

Her thumb kept jittering away from the final click. She wasn't after friendly unless it was a euphemism. A good euphemism, not people calling randoms they barely knew their bffs. Adding Historia would just be an awkward thing to feel weird about after they were done with each other.

"If you do decide to add her, you'll finally have more friends than Pock," Pieck said.

Ymir rolled her eyes. "That's already true. He didn't accept his boyfriend's friend request."

"Reiner's not my fucking boyfriend."

"Not with that attitude."

Porco's whole face was going to stick that color one day. It was like his blood vessels had never let go of that time he dyed his hair, and were forever paying tribute to their departed comrade. He pulled his needle out from mauling the dying pants and went to stabbing it in her direction. "Big talk from someone who's too afraid of getting turned down to send a simple friend request," he said. "Where's your winning attitude?"

" _Afraid_?" Ymir looked over at him incredulously. "It's a fucking button. Maybe that's scary to someone who still can't figure out how to sew them back on properly—"

A finger descended upon her phone.

The soft click stole the noise out of the tiny backroom of their foster dad's tailor shop.

So lovingly supplied for them to dole out their community service hours learning something useful. Patching up old clothes and hearts like the happy little drugged up elves in holiday specials. In the spirit of graduating high school and donating to the greater good instead of dragging life further backwards into raw evil.

Ymir stared at the screen in mute horror.

"Well," Pieck announced. "That takes care of that."

In what fucking world?

Ymir slowly turned to the shoulder Pieck was now hovering over. "Yeah," she said, "maybe if your life's ambition is keeping Pock out of the burn unit. You want a gold star for throwing me under the bus like that?"

A tiny alert noise dinged in her hand.

She looked down.

 _ **Historia Reiss** accepted your friend request._

Butterflies started up an orgy in her stomach.

Maybe there was something to pursuing a phone addict. Another tick in the win column for her good taste. Her thumb caressed the glow of the notification. Historia hadn't uploaded a profile photo, but her visage was burned into so many memories it didn't matter to Ymir's beating heart.

"Oh, would you look at that. She said yes." Pieck hummed thoughtfully behind her. "Do I still get a gold star?"

"I will find you a mountain of them if you stop trying to ruin this." Ymir smirked over at Porco. "And you thought there was a chance she'd turn me down."

Porco was actively forcing his head at a downward slant. The extra concentration did nothing for his work. "With all that projection skill, you should join stage crew," he muttered.

Pieck, being the obvious good friend in all of this, propped her head fully on Ymir's shoulder. "She's online," she said. "Maybe now's a good time to ask for her number. That way she'll think you friended her for a purpose instead of seeking validation for your purely physical relationship."

Ymir shoved Pieck back into her corner. Gently. She'd worked her way up to no crutches this weekend. Pushing her would probably count as a community disservice in the eyes of people who didn't know her. "She uses her phone for a million things at once." Possibly. Ymir still didn't have a single damn clue what she found so interesting about the device. She clicked her way over to Historia's timeline. "Being online doesn't mean she's interested in talking."

"All the more reason to put in the request now. You've already had to wait much longer than anticipated." Pieck eased back into her chair with a bland smile.

"Patience is a virtue," Ymir said. She was a little sick of them not getting that.

Porco's eyes rolled. Ymir continued extolling her virtues by ignoring him and perusing Historia's friend-locked Facebook page.

It was a whole lot of empty space. About a billion people had tagged her in photos, but she had zero original posts, no profile picture, no cover picture, and three friends. Pieck was one of them, which was annoying. Ymir was another, and the person with the avatar with twelve different charity icons crammed into it shared Historia's last name.

Without the few likes of tabloid articles by someone named Krista Lenz (and no one else, so Ymir felt entitled to her moments of green eyes), there would be almost nothing to look at. She wasn't sure if that was disappointing or one more thing to love about her. It did X out a few of the obvious possibilities for what she spent so much time doing on her phone. There was no way being a fangirl of some fake journalist was that consuming.

Ymir scrolled through a few of the titles. She wasn't going to read them, because they were probably nothing but meaningless gossip, but meaningless gossip that caught Historia's interest was worth knowing a thing or two about.

"Kenny's not going to sign off on your hours if you spend them all mooning over a girl," Porco said.

Five different articles on events the Reiss family had thrown. Maybe it was an ego stroke thing. Ymir could work with that. "I finished my pile."

"Yeah, you're supposed to go get another one when you do that."

Ymir clicked a link. Going by the date, it was from the month Historia transferred in. Something about a fundraiser. "I'll grab some off Marcel when he gets back," she said absently.

A fundraiser for local mental health charities, blah blah blah, extravagant, no expenses spared, all the movers and shakers invited, a huge distraction from Uri Reiss's recent, highly dubious acquittal—

Ymir stopped skimming. She went back to the head of the paragraph.

" _Of course, the true motivation for an event of this scale was to distract from Uri Reiss's recent legal troubles. Rod Reiss, the conductor of the gala, paid extensive fees to keep his brother out of jail, and few elite gatherings have gone by in recent months without speculation of Rod's involvement with his brother's cult. This has been a social nightmare for the family, and the fundraiser serves as a last-ditch effort to be put back in the positive public light. Naturally, Uri was barred from attending._ "

Ymir went back and clicked one of the other links.

" _This falls in line with the rumor that Reiss has gone to great lengths to deny, that his youngest child was born to his current wife, not his ex. He has repeatedly claimed that his marriage did not fail due to any affair—_ "

Ymir popped the rest of them open in different tabs.

A prominent theme was starting to emerge.

" _The Reiss family is well known for using its wealth to bypass the emotional instability of its head_."

" _Tybur has always tried to hold his tongue on the topic of his social adversary, but tonight it almost came to blows, and rumor has it that his sister had him dragged out of the premiere._ "

" _Rod Reiss, best known for marrying women chasing after his money—_ "

A brand new pile of ratty, donated clothes was dumped in front of her, accompanied by one of the few voices she didn't have a choice about listening to.

"Kid, you don't put that phone away, and I don't care how many holes you patch, I'm cutting your hours in half."

Ymir hastily shoved the phone into her pocket, trying to keep her eyes wide and innocent. Foster dad of the year, decked in six feet of leather and unamused five o'clock shadow, didn't buy it for a second. Porco, safe from his line of sight, looked happier than he had all day.

"I was just taking a break," she said.

Somewhere around a decade of history said that argument wasn't going to work.

Kenny was a nut with a cowboy fetish who liked to pretend he knew a thing about children. That covered ninety percent of their relationship. The other ten was some five flavors of work ethic and having eyes in the back of his head.

The ones in front of his head were busy not being impressed.

"Well ain't that good timing," Kenny drawled. "Now I don't have to wonder who's all fresh for this batch. And with you being so skilled at the trade, I know how eager you'll be to keep those hands helping. As you do when you've promised to."

Ymir grudgingly picked up the pair of shredded socks from the top of the pile. Which was on top of the pile of _beautifully_ patched clothes he was ignoring. "That's me. Always happy to help."

Kenny smiled in the way that had most of their neighbors assuming he was a serial killer instead of a weirdo wannabe parent. "Happy to hear it. If you can see about making me believe it, maybe you won't find your curfew being pulled back this week." He clapped her on the back and turned his attention to Porco. Who was still stuck on that one pair of pants.

Kenny's judgmental eye watched for a moment or two of profound self-control before he said, "Don't put all that strength into it. All you're gonna do is bend the needle. If you can't get it done in the next ten minutes, stick to sorting. Your brother and I will get to whatever you don't."

Everything Porco loved to hear. You have no idea what you're doing, so it's a good thing your big brother has your back. Along with the fake dad, but the state said he had to. That took some of the warmth out of it.

Kenny did cuff him on the shoulder on his way out the door. By their standards that probably counted as affection.

Pieck, working her way quietly through her assigned hours, and not one of Kenny's wayward wards who had zero of his trust since day one, was granted only a nod of approval. Ymir got a final nod of threatening. Brief act of supervision accomplished, he and his totally-still-in-style duster swept off. At least his sister had talked him out of wearing the cowboy hat indoors.

The second he was gone Ymir whipped her phone back out under the desk that counted as her workspace. She had some self-preservation skills, whatever Porco's hiss of exasperation thought.

She flicked away from the thousands of words of scathing animosity for the Reiss family and everything it stood for, making a note to definitely catch up another time, and over to the girl who was such a huge fan of people insulting her family.

She was still online.

She'd accepted the friend request. Instantly. Ymir got slower responses from people she was sitting right next to.

She'd all but said Ymir could ask her things.

Ymir tapped out a message and stuffed her phone in her pocket, keeping the privilege of eye contact limited to the socks at her station.

 _hey can i have ur #?_

Ten seconds later, her phone buzzed in response.


	6. Chapter 6

Spirit week was the worst.

School had about two things going for it: Education and meeting hot chicks.

Spirit week meant a whole lot of chucking education out the window, and losing out on the few chances she had to actually spend time with the hot chick of the moment. All in the name of a place she hated, full of people she hated a little less, and leading up to one more time of Porco hyperventilating over his brother smashing a bunch of guys in public.

Followed by a footnote of a dance where they all got to dress up as Kenny's advertisement stooges. Other standard features included yet more hyperventilating and handwringing over whether or not this would be the year that Pieck wasn't just going with Porco as a good friend. Ymir had ten bucks saying he needed another hundred years to grow the stones to make anything happen. Marcel's counter-bet was proof that no one should ever trust him with money.

Usually, the worst you could say about it was that the disco ball made taking incriminating photos a bitch.

This year, hot chick of the moment was probably going to end up Homecoming Queen, joined by douchewaffle of the century as King, and who the fuck wanted to see that? For once she and Porco had something to moan about together, which made Marcel and Cowboy Dad all warm and fuzzy in their feeling places, but she was at the stage in her life where all of her moans were meant to involve a girl.

Who probably didn't even care about the farce the wolves were feeding her to.

Spirit week was the worst.

Pajama day tried, but there were some things you just couldn't salvage.

But the real worst thing, rising above all the rest like a bad CGI monster in some B movie creature feature, was how no one could handle keeping it quarantined to that one week. The zombie apocalypse could hit, and they'd all die because they kept bringing their idiot bitten friends into the safe zone.

Ymir was left abandoned in her clean room, all on her lonesome with the toxic contaminant. Plus Thomas and Mina, who she was going to say counted.

The drama club had dumped all of their usable costumes on stage in the auditorium and begged her to help out with giving them something usable for their spirit week skit. Something to do with their club advisor being sick, half their members having the combined creativity of a blank sheet of paper, the other half being too enthusiastic to care, and Ymir being tagged as a human resource instead of a human.

It was not her fault that she got not-even-adopted by a tailor. Constant punishment for that sin could go rain down on someone else's head.

She took drama as an elective. She didn't do the nerd club stuff.

Hannah did.

Hannah's boyfriend was on the track team.

The same track team that wouldn't stop bitching about Ymir joining up.

This was the way to stop the bitching.

She wasn't the only one suffering. Historia had some fundraising thing to do instead of actual cheer practice. Ymir had watched the grip on her phone when she shared that bit of gossip. Thank fuck there wasn't a law against how many kinds of sex appeal one person could embody. Those delicate fingers had enough strength to break a man in two, and jailing them would be a crime against Ymir.

No cheerleading practice, and helping nerds.

She was a good person, what was this shit?

"So," Hannah said, entering through the wings with several layers of Hamlet and Iago in her arms, "we're going for a flip on Greek mythology, where the titans—" their school needed a more original team name— "kill off the gods. We have some togas somewhere for the gods, but no one has any good ideas yet for what the titans should wear."

"You could all go naked and give yourselves more time to rehearse," Ymir said. Lady Macbeth's wig had a hole in it. Thomas'd had the bright idea of inviting Connie to a rehearsal. Further bright ideas included seeing how far he could fling a spear. Connie's life not being a magnet of everything going wrong all the time, the track team took that as a sign to leave him alone instead of recruiting him.

"This is for school, Ymir."

"What kind of school doesn't love free anatomy lessons?"

Mina tossed Dracula's cape Ymir's way. "We aren't performing naked."

"We'd probably get more members if we did," Thomas said.

"Maybe even enough to make up for everyone getting suspended." Mina clapped her hands together. "Great idea!"

They couldn't just be normal and go with bribing the football team to read their script in front of everyone. That, Ymir thought, idly sorting through the field of fabric, would work way better for the type of skit they were putting on. They didn't need to go the full nine yards of work. Every single person in the gym was going to be watching the exits, not them. But no. The drama club: Home of drama nerds who insisted on being dramatic nerds.

The creaking door to the auditorium opened while Ymir checked off Tree #3's outfit for the list of possibles. An incident between Trees #1 and #2 had left it permanently stained in the school's _spirited_ white and blue. Pieck still had the pictures.

Marcel wouldn't even need a bribe if they went the football route. He stole away all the friendly genes before Porco could get his grubby hands on them. If Hannah was dragging Ymir into this, Ymir could drag her pseudo siblings along, too. Porco never got his dream of wearing a team jersey. It could be his time to dazzle the stage with his big brother, and save Ymir from the creative process that was an insult to the term.

How unfair was it that the only murder in this whole shebang was scripted. Fuck.

She was twirling a mask around her finger when a strangled sound came from Thomas. She shot him a glance, half-waiting for Hannah to start lecturing them all on how no food or drink was allowed in the auditorium—because it was exactly that sort of day—and found his gaping stare and mouth directed at something over her shoulder.

Ymir wasn't expecting anything interesting, but she looked anyway.

Her finger slipped out of the Phantom's eyehole.

Standing there not three feet away was the bright light of her days and nights, decked in boredom and unblemished cheerleader regalia, smartphone securely in hand.

Looking at Ymir.

"Historia," she said, casual as fuck. The squeak in her voice had thirst to blame. "How'd you get out of fundraising hell?"

Historia's shoulders rose, drawing her uniform tighter around her chest. Her feet took another half-step forward, and Ymir was never going to say a word against Historia's body, but heavenly sin was staring up at her instead of ducking a head down, and she needed another lifetime of it. "I wrote them a check."

She was going to fucking marry this girl. Lustfully. No romo.

"Nice. But I guess Ralph didn't get the memo?"

"It's Sannes today." Historia took another step, and fluttered herself down to sit next to Ymir. Their knees were touching. Historia's bare one was warm enough to burn through the denim shielding Ymir's. "No one told him that there wouldn't be practice."

Her attention dropped to her phone.

"Was that your doing, or did mom and dad drop the ball?" Ymir asked.

When Historia's jaw clenched like that, Ymir had the barely controllable urge to cup her face in her hands. Maybe only one, to leave the other free for wandering.

"I don't think they know where the ball is," Historia said in a tone that screamed how many Krista Lenz hate pieces she had favorited over the years.

Ymir didn't have the exact number, but the vitriol made for good bedtime reading, and Historia always liked Ymir's posts when she complimented the work. Even with Ymir keeping the references vague. Her twelve Facebook friends didn't need to know that Historia's parents were dicks. Like their home lives were all that great.

Historia still always caught the references. Ymir was working her way up the ranks in her likes.

"Um."

Couldn't she just have nice things? Bubble of privacy popped, she scowled at Thomas. He quickly went back to examining the cloak in his hands, but not before giving her a subtle thumbs up and a mouthed "wow," that earned him temporary clemency for his role in all this.

Mina and Hannah thought their new arrival worth a shrug (dubbing them tasteless and way too into her boyfriend, respectively), Mina tossing another strip of blue fabric Ymir's way before nudging Hannah slightly further upstage. "Keep an eye out for school colors. We're banned from dying things unsupervised after last year."

Ymir was surrounded by people who thought being an honor student was a badge of incompetence. This was ending with them stealing football uniforms. She was in favor of skipping ahead to that right the hell now.

Historia's leg shifted against hers.

Later worked too.

Her phone wasn't three inches from her nose today. The screen was at an angle, leaving room for Ymir to see blips of the articles she was flicking through. More gossip rags, plus a few charity things that went by too fast to judge. Ymir caught a tab of Tetris and Candy Crush when she bounced browsers. Clearly no worries here about guardians skinning her alive for using too much data.

Or hell, maybe that was what she was gunning for. Pock had to get off Ymir's case for being shallow. Historia had enough depth to fill the Marianas Trench, and with lighting to match. The sparkly golden hair was clearly just there for contrast.

Dropping the pretense of being helpful, Ymir considered Historia's face. Past the pretty parts for anyone else, but that wasn't a thing with her, so parallel to the pretty parts.

Historia never minded her staring. If Ymir ever bothered making a top ten list of her most alluring features, that would be up there. She kept the same listless, deeply uninterested expression on her face even with Ymir telegraphing exactly what she had in mind to change that. Historia probably hated spirit week, too. She'd like the extra cheer practice, even with the waste of her talents that was the squad's choreography, but hyperbolic school pride was no fix for perpetual boredom. If mingling with peasants was her thing, she wouldn't be sitting next to Ymir.

Ymir gave a passing thought to the school court homecoming would be setting up.

"Historia," she said. Historia's fingers kept scrolling. "Any plans for the homecoming dance?"

Hell, she sounded like she was fishing for a date.

Historia's hand stilled. She didn't look up from her phone. Ymir could already tell every other set of eyes in the room was making up for that, and if it wouldn't bring the track team right on back, she would definitely leap her way over to murder as a solution to that squealing fucking gasp of Hannah's. Lucky them, Mina telling her to be quiet in the worst stage whisper in history snuck in as a willing substitute.

"I won't be attending." A small wrinkle twitched Historia's perfectly perfect eyebrows out of place. Ymir was going to die, and that was fine. "My parents have an event that night."

"Wow. Some planning."

Historia's face almost caught an expression. Her eyes flicked to Ymir. She said, slowly, "They aren't up to date on school functions."

Ymir nodded indulgently. "Because they don't know where the ball is."

"Right."

Blue spotlights, free from any sign of duplicitous genius, stayed fixed on Ymir. Her phone had made a full descent to her lap. Center stage belonged to them, lurking helper monkeys banished.

Marriage. With white fucking roses everywhere. Porco wouldn't be invited unless he brought Reiner or Pieck as his date. They'd get a giant cake, Marcel could figure out the rings, and Historia had so much money that they'd never have to leave the hotel room.

Ymir tried smirking, but the corners of her mouth were doing weird things and stretching too wide for the effect. "Good thing they have such an athletic daughter."

For so very many reasons. One of those very toned legs was still hooked to Ymir's. The look its owner was letting loose said it wasn't moving anytime soon. A thousand infirmary visits couldn't cure this kind of ache, even if they had a real nurse, and that was just life now.

Historia inched closer. Barely at all except for the story Ymir's heartbeat was reciting.

She would so take that.

Historia would go back to her phone, Hannah's romantic whimsy would lose out to wanting shit done, and spirit week still sucked. But no one was dancing with Historia at homecoming or giving other people ideas about her accessibility, and the world was fucking beautiful.

How was that for a no-brainer? Like it had any other choice with Historia in it.


	7. Chapter 7

This wasn't happening.

Mr. Smith had a standing policy. Help out cleaning his classroom at the end of the week, get extra credit as judged by the custodian. Porco did not need the extra credit, Ymir could fuck right off with that, but he wasn't going to turn it down. Kenny'd had them fighting for Levi's approval through chores since second grade. He knew how to clean a room.

For anyone who cared to know, that meant he was easy to find on Friday afternoons, scraping gum off desks with Connie and Sasha (who did need the extra credit).

Reiner Braun was not supposed to care.

He wasn't supposed to be sitting on a desk Porco had just cleaned, pretending to be cool, while people who did care were prepping for practice like the coaching staff told them to. Good to know this was the work ethic that kept him off the team.

"Hi," he'd said, smiling that toothpaste commercial grin Porco's way, stepping into the history room like he belonged there.

He didn't. He had history with Mr. Dok. Reiner had no reason at all to be sitting on a desk in Mr. Smith's classroom, shooting finger guns at Connie and breathing so deeply that the buttons on his polo shirt were straining to keep his oversized muscles from bursting free.

That wasn't some kind of _accident_.

Marcel joked that Reiner was too swol for things like clothes. Marcel, being a normal person, didn't get it. Porco had survived a year of PE with Reiner before. Mr. Quarterback Superstar had a thing for flexing in front of mirrors. He would come to school shirtless every day if he could. Wearing clothes that barely fit, showing off the body that everyone fell over themselves to praise every time his team scored him a touchdown, was as close as he could get.

Ymir said he was too much of a square to use steroids. He was, but there was no natural reason for someone's arms to be that big. Marcel was ten times the athlete Reiner was, and he still looked like a person, not a teenage bodybuilder.

"I was looking to hit you up, and Marcel said you'd be here," Reiner had said, propping his sculpted ass on top of Porco's hard work. Yeah sure, Levi wouldn't notice that at all.

Now Reiner was looking at him like Porco had anything to do with this conversation. It wasn't even a conversation. Reiner just decided to walk in and ruin his day, and since that couldn't be enough, he was trying to turn it into a group project.

Did he somehow not remember what those went like? Those five weeks of third grade where they were paired in art were the longest of their short lives, Kenny getting called in three separate times—culminating in him being permanently barred from PTA thanks to Reiner's mother (what was her _problem_ )—and last Porco had stepped in that room, the air conditioning vent was still clogged with papier-mâché.

Not to mention last year's English mess. It was like the guy lived to tear down Porco's grade point average.

Cluing in a little in the stony silence, Reiner got to the point.

"Your sister's friends with Historia Reiss, right?"

The point was that this was actually fucking happening.

"She is not my sister," Porco said, sourly.

Reiner barely had eyebrows, but what was there knit together. "Ymir?" he said, like Porco couldn't figure out who they were talking about on his own. "Marcel said you guys were family."

There was something sick about Reiner using Marcel's good nature as a weapon. Porco glowered at the concerned pouting thing his lips were doing. He hoped Reiner knew it made him look stupid.

Porco cleared his throat. The words weren't showing up the first try. "She's Ymir. What do you care?"

Reiner perked up. Like, his whole body bounced like a spring. "You know how homecoming's next week?"

No, _really_? That thing the student council had thrown away their budget for to get banners covering every other hallway? That was _happening_? Who could have guessed.

Porco nodded obediently, jaw clenched. Ymir had dragged him into enough school plays for him to know when he was supposed to be following a script. Not that Reiner would care. He had his pep talk face on. Sunshine confidence was leaking out of his pores. He was impossible to talk to when he got like this. He was impossible most of the time anyway, but it was somehow _worse_ when he had that sparkle in his eyes to go with his teeth.

"I," Reiner announced, "want to ask Historia to the dance."

Porco's concept of a just and fair world crumbled.

"What."

"Yeah," Reiner said, somehow not hearing the blood-curdling scream resounding in Porco's chest. "It seems like the thing to do, you know? Every school has a power couple. Doesn't hurt that she's some kind of saint. She raised more money for the cheerleaders' fundraiser than they've had in years, and—"

And what, he didn't get enough pretty blond when he looked in the mirror? Blood pumped loudly in Porco's ears. Reiner's visage blurred.

Perfect logic. No, let's not date someone we know, and maybe like for reasons that aren't total crap, let's go with the person who matches some absurd popularity scale that neither one of us really deserves. Such sense. Much thought. Wow.

Where did he get off, anyway, thinking about asking someone out on such short notice? Asking someone out he clearly didn't know anything about, and dragging Porco into it because he wouldn't know tact if it bit him on his perfect ass, and holy fuck, _Historia Reiss_?

 _Really_?

Connie and Sasha were scrubbing windows. The squeaking matched his grinding teeth.

Was taste just not a thing? Did he miss something? Was walking around like an alien abductee in now?

Reiner had never even _talked_ to her, if he had he wouldn't need a damn proxy to hold his behemoth hand.

He was talking to Porco just fine— _he was still fucking talking_ , so _clearly_ conversational skills gave him some kind of buzz—but sure, no, go for the opposite of that. Treating each other like equal human beings who didn't need stilts to be at eye level was way too conventional and un-creepy for the undisputed lord of the school.

"—pretty, too—"

Porco saw red.

"Fuck _off_ , she's already dating my sister!"

…

…

The windows stopped squeaking.

Reiner's mouth stayed open, without sound, and that was so damn preferable Porco was going to kill something, hopefully him. The pressure in his head let off, and a crisp twinge of satisfaction took its place.

For the five seconds of peace he had before his brain caught up.

"Oh," Reiner said.

Connie and Sasha were both staring, looking like summer break had come back early.

 _Oh_ , Porco thought.

Oh no.

"I guess that doesn't work, then."

Reiner lifted himself off the desk, arms flexing for pure show. The creases in his ill-fitting shirt said his abs were doing all the work, and Porco didn't know why that mattered, but he was in hell now, and some of that meant watching Reiner-the-human-specimen getting to his feet in slow motion while flames crept up Porco's face.

This was not happening.

"They aren't public about it," Porco blurted. Dawning horror made his voice come out echoey. He made as much eye contact with Reiner as he could stand. "Don't go—they aren't… Don't spread it around."

Reiner's face melted into compassionate understanding. Awful look for him. "No problem. I wouldn't—hey," his hand was on Porco's shoulder and he wanted to bite it off, "I know how it can be." _What did that mean_. "Don't worry about a thing, man. I've got your back. And theirs."

He was smiling. Why was he smiling. Porco needed him to stop.

"You should let Ymir know they're a really cute couple."

They weren't, and there was no way Reiner had ever had that thought until five seconds ago.

He gave Porco's shoulder an extra pat. "I'll catch you at practice."

The silence left in Reiner's wake when he exited the classroom was how most horror movies started.

Porco looked at Connie.

Connie looked at Sasha.

Sasha looked delighted.

"Ymir finally has a girlfriend?"

Hell.

* * *

Staying in Mr. Smith's room until every other human being in the school was gone was not going to work out. Ymir would find him and laugh at him. Then maybe never speak to him again. Marcel would find him and want to know what was wrong. Levi would find him, ignore him, and tell Kenny something was wrong.

Pieck would find him, and be so wonderful he'd want to tell her what was wrong.

Pieck did find him.

She stood in the doorway, leaning too heavily against it. Her arms hated going a full week with crutches. Ymir usually made good on playing pack mule for her backpack, but there was a limit to how much they could help. It sucked.

Pieck smiled through the shadows under her eyes. "It's not like you to take so long with the cleaning, Pock."

There were days when that smile was all Porco needed to love life. Today was one of them before Reiner showed up and got him to ruin everything. Porco stopped viciously scrubbing his desk with a paper towel. "Pieck," he said, "have you ever done something really stupid."

"No, never," was the real answer to that. Pieck was the only person he had ever met who was immune to bad decisions. He'd known her since they were five. She was just gifted like that. Even Marcel had his screw-ups. Like being friends with quarterbacks.

Pieck rested her chin on top of her crutch. "Oh dear, what have you done?"

He frowned at his abused paper towel. Cleanser and force had torn a hole in it.

"Reiner wanted to ask Historia out to the homecoming dance." And that was still the most fucking irritating thing to _think_ , forget saying it out loud. If these people wanted a blonde, short, emotionless girl to rip their hearts out of their chests, they should hit up Annie. All the same stupid kinks, none of the delusion that there was something real there.

He'd told Ymir that and she'd told him to shut his whore mouth.

Pieck cocked her head. "He hasn't heard? She's not going."

…

Well fuck that, too. Historia Reiss was some kind of cursed object designed to fuck with his life. Days after talking to Reiner weren't supposed to get _worse_. Before Ymir and her stupid crush that he wasn't allowed to call a crush without her whining, him alone in a room with Reiner was peak misery.

He sucked the injustice up and glowered at his desk. His stomach wouldn't stop squirming. "I told Reiner Ymir's dating Historia," he said.

He could hear Pieck's brain humming in the empty space of a thousand missing comments about how tactless and idiotic that combination of words was. And he'd said it in front of Connie. Sasha could remember when not to gossip. Her best friend knowing the gossip and giggling with her in study hall helped with that. Connie could not keep his mouth shut. That was how he kept losing the stashes of weed he tried to hide around school. He told people about them. Regularly.

Porco's fingers flexed.

Ymir was never going to forgive him.

It was over her sex life—which she didn't even _have_ , it didn't matter how many times she called it that—so what'd he care, but.

"Less accurate things have been said," Pieck said. Her crutches thumped across Mr. Smith's floor.

Porco moodily ripped his paper towel into smaller pieces. "Yeah, dating isn't really what she's after."

"Isn't it?"

Porco gave Pieck a look. It melted in the face of her smile. It was a lot closer than the doorway now, and proximity upped its powers to reincarnation levels of healing. He probably didn't deserve that right now. Fucking Reiner. He murdered the butterflies and focused on the much easier target of Ymir being a horrible person. "You've had to listen to her just as much as I have. I don't think she knows what romance _is_."

And if she did, she definitely didn't care about it. He knew enough about Historia now to feel like a pervert by association.

Pieck sat down on the desk next to his. She twirled one of her crutches. "And we all know that people never evade their feelings by telling themselves it's something else."

Porco snorted. "Are you kidding me? No one really does that."

Especially not Ymir. He could almost say he liked that about her, when she wasn't making her main mission in life having sex with a girl she barely knew. If Historia turned out to be a serial killer, she had the money and family lawyers to get away with it. They'd already sprung one family member out of jail. It wasn't like he and Marcel and Kenny could back up the legal fees to bring someone like that to justice. He wouldn't even get a chance to say I told you so.

"Well," Pieck said, after a delayed pause, "you would know your sister best."

"Not my sister." His mouth got tired of saying that over and over again, and it was doubly annoying with people who _knew_ what was up, but Pieck just smiled at him, sending rainbow cotton candy fluff to fuzz up his brain.

"She won't hate you, Pock."

Porco rolled his eyes. Mr. Smith needed to do something about his air conditioning. He was overheating.

"She won't," Pieck repeated. Her calloused hand stroked the back of his before cupping it warmly. "She knows how important Reiner is to you—"

" _Pieck_."

She squeezed his hand. "And even if she didn't," Pieck continued, like she wasn't leaving him scarred for life by making his heart swoop through the air and crash into a brick wall at the same time, "she will be delighted to have something to hold over your head. You are now the horrible person who started the rumor that she's interested in feelings. You're going to be doing her chores for weeks."

Hurrah. He could hear all about how badly he was folding the sheets she planned to defile her not-girlfriend on. "Are you trying to make me feel worse?"

Pieck patted him compassionately on the head. "Never."

Porco scoffed and looked out the window.

Stupid air conditioning.

Fucking Ymir.


	8. Chapter 8

It was the night before spirit week, and all through the house, every creature was stirring, including the bitchass mouse no one wanted to put out traps for. There was half an hour left until curfew, Ymir had all of her homework done and a kicking new Sudoku app. Life was her oyster and she was swimming for pearls.

Her favorite pearl was swimming right back to her.

Historia had liked five Krista Lenz pieces in the last ten minutes. Old ones.

Ymir took a stab in the dark that was lit up like a Christmas tree.

 _looking forward to ur party?_

Three, two, one…

 ** _No._**

There wasn't a best part to seducing Historia, since it all involved Historia and she was undoubtedly the best, but insta-reply texting was pretty fucking sweet. Even if she didn't leave much to work with. Weren't cute girls in love with their phones supposed to be better about texting with real words? Ymir rolled onto her stomach, dangling her tapping fingers off her bed.

 _take pics_

 _we can sell em to lenz for ez $$$_

Ymir was halfway through devising her follow-up text about how the wealthy one in that arrangement would naturally want to do the right thing and give Ymir all the cash. It would have been a fun text, and gotten Historia's eyes to do that glowy thing she did instead of smiling. Guaranteed. Stud 101 was etched into Ymir's DNA, and not the cheat sheet version.

Historia had the faster fingers (damn they were going to be fun), and her page of the rule 34 choose-your-own-adventure book said more about her parents than any of the hate pieces Ymir went through like candy.

 ** _I'm not allowed to have my phone with me during the event._**

For real.

Had these people ever like, met their daughter? That wriggly thing that came out of where they liked to bump uglies? Needed some help getting back to wriggly, permanently fused to a screen?

 _w_

 _t_

 _f_

 _?_

 _?_

 ** _It is considered rude._**

Thanks to Lenz, Ymir knew her way around the gossip scene the Reisses occupied. These people bought gaudy yachts to distract their friends from their toddler winning a frowny face on a reading assignment. She'd forwarded Historia a video just last week of two grown women in ball gowns trying to stab each other with their stilettos. Historia messaged her back with citations. Milli Tybur's birthday party, last year. One of them left blood in the pool.

Rudeness was a shiny Lamborghini way of life. They were all majorly orthodox dicks. Pretending they weren't so they could ruin an evening for the one good thing they'd ever produced was the fucking worst.

 _tfw ur parents r bitches_

Porco knocked on her door. You could always tell it was him and not Marcel because he compensated for having no positive life prospects by imitating battering rams. Semi-Dad went old school with yelling. Ymir didn't bother looking up. "We're closed."

Porco showed his usual appreciation of her boundaries and prodded her door open to poke his head through. "Kenny's got some hot chocolate going. You want me to bring you any?"

Ymir looked up.

Porco crossed his arms. Her poor, maladjusted not-sibling was trying to smile. She could see it in his beady, deeply apologetic eyes. His confused facial muscles turned it into a defensive scowl.

"Great," Ymir said. "What did you do?"

"What makes you think I did anything?" he asked, adding one more piece of confirmation.

They'd grown up in the same house. A guy who saw no problem lying to the cops about at least seven outstanding felonies and assorted misdemeanors fostered them. Where had it all gone wrong? Pock was like some kind of boy scout cryptid, and he'd hated Boy Scouts. "You're trying to be nice."

He stopped trying to smile and brought the full thunder of his glare. Little old ladies' hearing aids would need a retuning to catch it. "I'm always nice."

"Ha." Ymir rolled over and grinned at upside down Porco. "Did I get a name change? Am I Pieck now? Because if that's how it is, I don't think I'm allowed to have you in my room. Whatever kind of mischief would a young, virile boy and a girl get up to without the sweet protection of adult supervision—"

"Would you shut up and let me be nice?" Porco growled. "Do you want hot chocolate or not?"

Ymir clasped her hands behind her head. "Wow. Must be something bad."

Porco sulked instead of answering. He hid his face in the door's shadow and everything. Maybe next time Hannah wanted to bribe someone for her drama squad, she'd let Ymir volunteer him as tribute. In the same fantasy world where she didn't bring up him flubbing his lines as Oscar the Grouch in kindergarten. Too bad there hadn't been a slot for Eeyore, he would've been gr9 after that performance.

Ymir took benevolent pity on Pock. He got worked up every day over all sorts of things that didn't matter, and more importantly, he was cutting into her Historia time. "Hot chocolate sounds good," she said.

"Great," he said, slouching off.

She hoped whatever the story was there, it was a fun one. She went back to her phone to catch Historia's response to the parent comment, fingers already armed to let Historia know that she shared a house with a tool.

She stopped them an inch away from the screen.

Tiny animated ellipses filled the spot where Historia's words were supposed to be. Then they went away. Then they came back. For a full twenty seconds. Ymir brought up the clock and counted.

Finally, a word got out.

 ** _Yes_.**

Ymir squinted at it. It had a menace to it that didn't really fit with the cozy mood of a person waiting to be served hot chocolate. She scanned the previous messages about the Reiss party. Something uncomfortable and weighty squirmed in her chest. She swung her legs off her bed and sat up.

 _u ok?_

Three, two, one…

She was up too late and spending too much time with Porco. The instantaneous response still felt good.

 ** _Yes._**

 ** _Thanks for asking._**

A second later, a smiley face popped up.

Fluttering slayed off the heaviness. For the moment, anyway—she had a few thoughts that could use some later spelunking. Still, score one for the number one stud. Ymir dragged her thumb over the smiley face. Bright and yellow, it couldn't really compare, even just talking hair color, but… She grinned.

 _wanna hear about pock being a loser?_

* * *

Connie was the one to share the inspiring story.

As it turned out, it wasn't a fun one. More in the realm of massively disastrous.

"Why didn't you tell me you were dating Historia?!"

Ymir had never expected to enjoy spirit week. That just wasn't a thing. Day 1 kicked it off with the aptly named Nerd Day, full of guessing how many pieces of bad candy were crammed into jars, with the entire second half of the school day taken up by weird quiz bowl shit that won you nothing but snack shack vouchers. They had to sit through every grade level doing their version. Ymir couldn't even ditch because she got voted to represent her homeroom every year. Armin and Marco would ignite their inner pyro if she so much as thought about not showing up.

So none of it ever had the option of going well. Marcel winning his big game at the end of the week, and getting to literally roll out of bed and walk to school. Those were the highlights.

There were levels of hell, though. Dante was pretty explicit on that. Even if he'd left out a few.

This one, where someone handed Porco the wheel on her sex life? Treachery didn't quite cover it, and that was supposed to be his fucking punishment anyway, _not_ hers. There was no justification for her school day starting out with Connie bouncing off the walls with his fluffy romance dreams and talk of her finally getting some (at least someone had skimmed the supportive friend cliff notes).

Forget trying to bring the little twerp to the side of reason, too. Connie's closet jokes were only funny when they were both high, but first off, that never stopped him, and second, they were way less funny when he thought they were Blue's final clue. She told him Porco was off his fucking rocker, and what did she get?

"Aw, are you _shy_?"

People would miss Connie if she murdered him. She could see herself being one of them. That kept him breathing through a lot. Verdict was still out on today being added to the list.

Thanks to her skidding through the hallways Levi had just waxed, he'd probably make it through the morning. Connie had a way of falling outside the bell curve with life. She'd call it a gift if when she felt like being nice to him again.

There wasn't even a point to rushing, except maybe getting the track team back on her ass. What was she supposed to say? Hey, my idiot friend is helping my idiot brother spread untruths, I know we've never directly talked about it, but are we still down to bang without any feels besides slick silken skin on skin action?

First day of spirit week, and she was doing something stupid for no good reason several hours early.

Ymir knew the path to Historia's locker by heart, even if she had the good sense (that was what it was, Pieck could shut up and stop giving Connie lines) to keep away for most of the day. Sticking around outside someone's locker was what Pock and his eternally pining heart did. She had standards.

That section of the hallway had two modes: block of empty space, and mass of football players.

Reiner, dressed to the nerd nines in full theme day cosplay (was that a _pocket protector_ ) chatting up Historia with no one else around—handing her a _letter_ —was not one of the modes. Didn't he pay any attention to gossip? As far as he knew, Historia had a girlfriend. Crap like this was why Porco would never admit he liked the douche.

Historia, aside from the usual gorgeous, looked as close to perturbed as mere mortals ever had the chance of provoking. Jury was out on how to take that, but Ymir was not above decking the school quarterback if he was making her girl uncomfortable. Or just for the hell of it.

Prepping for the full Rambo treatment, she marched forward and—

—caught sight of the damn rainbows on the pamphlet Reiner was shoving at Historia, and holy fucking _hell_ this was why he was exactly Pock's kind of douche. He was squishier than Marcel and had larger tits. Pieck had to have the self-esteem of Tony the Tiger to wave off this level of competition.

Reiner was chatting happily about how the school counselor had sat him down and given him one of these pamphlets way back when, and how much it had helped, and how no one should have to worry so much about keeping it a secret…

Ymir was close enough to read the heading.

Continuing the rainbow theme, in bright, perky lettering, the pamphlet shouted to the world, "Gay Means Happy!"

Fucking Reiner.

Like. _Fucking_ Reiner.

Historia had a death grip on her phone, and Ymir had the feeling that if Reiner didn't stop invading her personal space, there was a good chance it would wind up lodged in his skull. That was the type of quality entertainment she'd normally think about paying real money for, but unlike a few seconds ago, Ymir was willing to admit that Reiner maybe didn't really deserve it. Today, anyway.

Ymir stepped forward to save her damsel in distress. "Yo, Mr. Quarterback. Isn't your first class on the other side of school?"

Reiner beamed like a light bulb. Historia didn't, but the sudden slack in those delectable shoulders made Ymir's face feel like one. She drifted to Historia's side, not completely hating how bright that made Reiner's smile.

"I was just heading off," he said, brandishing his pamphlet happily. "I wanted to make sure I caught your girl here," fuck stop it those words shouldn't sound that good out loud, "before class started."

Ymir snatched up the rainbow reading before someone lost an eye. Her arm landed conveniently around Historia. "Really racking up those kingly points before homecoming, huh?"

"It's the least I could do." He cleared his throat and stepped even further into the privacy bubble that could not be more clearly outlined. Historia and Ymir inside the bubble, the rest of the world fucking off away from it. "No one wants to be that guy. If Porco hadn't filled me in, I would have had to kick my own ass. Besides," he added, "it's rough out there. Gotta take care of each other, right?"

Fuc _king_ Reiner. He was earning that damn crown.

Smiling his heart out one last time at both of them, fake glasses sparkling under the flickering hall lights, he walked off with a jaunty salute. An actual salute. How did Marcel handle spending every day with this. He was like the leading man of five different genres all at once.

Historia slumped gently into Ymir's side.

Put with the painful, awful, unthinkable suggestion in Reiner's parting words, an unfortunate world where she'd have to forgive Porco early started to dawn.

Ymir looked down at the girl she had successfully maneuvered into full body contact. She smelled good. Usually Historia was covered in sweat when they talked. Great look and all, but this close, this early, Ymir could catch the scent of her soap. Weird. She wasn't that into smells. Levi's mom liked to bring over scented candles, and it was a canonized miracle they never suffocated anyone.

She was pretty into Historia.

They weren't doing anything the purity police would hang them for, but at a head below her, Historia fit to her body with sinful snugness. She was made of muscle; Ymir gawked at it daily. Holding her, though, it was hard to feel anything but warm softness. A lot of softness. Some of her hair was resting on Ymir's hand, and it was the thing cartoon clouds were made of, complete with a fake angel chorus.

The first bell was going to ring soon. They'd have to go to class, and people would be saying things, and there'd be the quiz bowl from hell, and Ymir would end up with a gazillion vouchers she didn't ask for.

Fuck, she didn't want to move. Historia seemed in agreement there. Her phone was off and everything. As long as that had nothing to do with any of what Reiner or anyone else had been filling her ears with, awesomesauce. Too bad Ymir wasn't sure she could trust her luck to hold out that far.

"Sorry," she said, the silence growing too cozy for comfort. "Some of that was my fault."

Historia shrugged. "It sounded more like your foster brother's."

"Yeah, pretty much entirely." Ymir could probably get away with pulling her closer. She went for it, filling their bubble with a little more noise to clear out the jitters. "This was the missing piece of the hot chocolate story."

Historia drew a finger down her phone case. Slowly. Carpal porn at its finest.

Ymir cut to the chase before her cave brain took over. The bell would stop anything before it could start.

"How much attention do you pay to gossip anyway?"

The finger froze.

Awkward eye contact was established.

Ymir bailed. "Forget it."

She was taking her arm off Historia's shoulder with a lot less reluctance than anticipated when Historia grabbed it. The pronounced cords in her wrist were the things NC-17 dreams were made of, and the angel chorus spiked into glorious overdrive. Ymir's pulse joined it.

"I'd owe you dinner," Historia said. "If we were dating."

 _Ba-dump_ went the heart. It could go join Pock in the shame corner.

Ymir propped herself against Historia's locker, Historia's body just going ahead and melting into hers with the shift. That was fine. Fine. Fine, fine, fine, she was fucking _fine as hell_. "Just one dinner? Aren't you a little rich to be that cheap?"

Historia's head nudged her chin. Ymir didn't know what she put in her hair, but she wanted to bathe in it. Preferably together. "Aren't you a little demanding for someone who hasn't asked me out?"

That was when the bell rang.

Interrupting Ymir's very clever, very snarky, very eloquent response.

Thank fuck.

* * *

"Here's the part I don't get," Ymir said, shaking the spray bottle one last time before popping the lid.

"Pieck told you to tell me. You told you to tell me. Were you waiting for Dear Abby to get back to you?"

Porco, neck deep in hair gel, stuck his eyes off the mirror they were sharing—Ymir didn't know much about hair, but that was not the way to get it to do what you wanted—and kept up the permanent state of blush he'd been in since yesterday. His version of conciliation was keeping his mouth shut on every comment about her life he was dying to make. He was going to give himself an ulcer. Or a stroke. His delicate nerves were clearly not meant for the great outdoors, and the chronic silence was starting to make Ymir's ears feel lopsided.

She picked up the hand mirror Kenny had lent them and got to spraying. She was thinking flames to go with her hotness. Only on the back. Porco could keep his red; her hair looked awesome without ruining it with Super Saiyan highlighter all the way through.

Wacky Hair Day wasn't the worst thing ever. Splitting a bathroom with Porco and Marcel while they tried to figure out something that would qualify wasn't either. Being socially obligated to participate because big brother was a big football star? A royal motherfucking pain. None of the rest of the week mandated grooming changes.

Marcel wasn't even awake yet. Ymir and Porco had both lunged to keep his razor from trading places with his toothbrush, and he'd barely noticed.

Porco took one of those deep, cleansing breaths the yoga infomercials swore by.

"I thought it might blow over."

"The fuck you did."

Porco's moratorium on eye contact broke. "There was a chance," he said defensively. "Connie stayed quiet the whole weekend. The last time that happened, you were both grounded."

That almost came close to being a point. Certain parental influences had decided that the use of recreational substances during tutoring sessions wasn't worth paying for. Other parental influences agreed, and long story short, Connie was still mostly failing math while Ymir missed out on some extra pocket money.

"Yeah, he forgot his phone in his locker. Didn't stop Reiner from spewing rainbows out of his ass first thing in the morning. Great job, Pock. A+ work."

Ymir puffed some of her dye on the Darth Maul spikes Pock was twisting into his hair. His goopy hand made a swipe for the bottle that failed fantastically, nearly clubbing his brother and the showerhead. This was not a bathroom built for more than half a person.

Marcel took that as his cue to pipe up with his golden boy opinion. "Oh yeah, I wanted to tell you two," he said. "Thanks for cheering him up. Reiner's been throwing like a champ lately. New personal bests all over the place."

"And we're all so happy for him," Ymir said. "Right Porco?"

Porco continued ripping his hair out in the mirror.

Marcel, many minutes away from doing anything with his, gave Ymir the best big brother look he could with his eyes still glazed over. Spirit week football practice was the Everest version of boot camp. Ymir rolled her eyes and dumped her bottle on the counter. She stepped the half an inch to the left that let her creep behind Porco. "Stop mauling yourself. Gimme."

Obedience didn't come easy for Porco, but neither did art, and he knew it. He dropped his hands and stood still. Ymir ruffled his stiffening locks.

"Are you really going to spend the whole week sulking? It's not your sex life someone tampered with." She smirked at him. "Unless we're counting your heartbreak over Reiner finally getting you alone to ask about a girl."

" _Your_ girl."

Way to unfunny a room. Ymir gave one of his new spikes a rough twist and said, for posterity, "I'm not the one who wanted him away from her so badly I made up some schmaltzy story."

"Only because you weren't in the room," Porco said.

"I could be in that room a million times and never have that reaction."

They both knew she could see his eyes rolling. NASA probably could. Good to know he'd stopped trying to make it all up to her. Too bad for him he'd already agreed to do her laundry. "Right," Porco said, "you'd think of murder before contaminating your sexcapades with feelings."

"Stop stealing words from your girlfriend. And stop twitching so much," she added. He was going to get gel on her shirt. She needed that for wearing. "Besides, if I murdered him, the jury would take one look at Historia and call anything justified along the path of hitting that."

"You're a virgin," Marcel interrupted around his floss. "What are you worrying about sex so much for?"

Secretly, Marcel was not a teenage boy. He was Frankenstein's monster if Frankenstein's monster was sewn out of principles and Care Bear fluff.

"Have you _seen_ her?" Ymir asked.

"With you, yeah." Marcel spat into the sink and reached for his mouthwash through the legions of hair product on the counter. "For a no-sex thing, you seem pretty happy with it. It's nice. Plus, you freaked when you thought something was going to screw it up."

He threw the fluoride back like a shot glass he wouldn't dream of touching for several more years, oblivious to the storm of lies he was courting.

Maybe. This was the same guy who had let Porco hate Reiner for stealing his spot on the football team even though he got it because Marcel cared less about Reiner getting a concussion, and vouched for him. Pock still didn't have a damn clue.

"Rude," Ymir said, before the pause could load itself up. "Something is standing right next to us, and he has very fragile feelings about what we call him." Porco growled. Ymir ignored him and continued sculpting his hair. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Marcel dunk his head under the sink. He'd figured out how to do that without getting anyone else wet when they were ten. "Please tell me you get that the no-sex thing is a prelude to the sex thing."

He looked up, blinking back water. "Do you?" he asked.

Porco's reflection was unusually attentive.

"Yes," Ymir said. Stating the obvious for the drowsy zombie. "I'm the one who thought it up."

Marcel shrugged. "Cool then. As long as you're happy."

He picked up a towel and patted his face dry.

Porco and Ymir stared at each other in a rare moment of solidarity.

He had to be adopted.

* * *

Pieck was the only person Ymir knew who owned a nightgown.

She called it a nightgown. It was a piece of Porco's Halloween costume from junior high. She still wore it to bed, meaning that in a sea of wrinkled t-shirts and boxers, she wafted through with skulls and pumpkins flopping about her ankles. Towards where Historia was sitting.

There weren't any rules about which part of the cafeteria they claimed for lunch. They could sit wherever they wanted, and they did, and convenience meant that they always wanted to sit at the same table. Also for convenience, Ymir usually got caught making the choice. English was closest, Porco wouldn't have a single leadership bone in his body until he got it on with Reiner, and Pieck and walking fast kept sending each other to the nurse's office.

Pieck never got to pick where they sat.

Today, someone had tried to blow themselves up in Doc Hange's class, and Pieck was one of the first people in the cafeteria line.

"Hello, Ymir," she had said. "Some approximation of small talk," she had said as Historia walked across the room, planting herself at the very edge of the bench for the table she'd been corralled to when she first transferred. Wearing her pajamas.

It was Pajama Day. People did that.

People. Who would have thought a goddess wanted to join in.

Historia's version of school spirit was rearranging her parents' party to avoid making up baseless lies about why she wasn't going to the homecoming dance. She didn't do nerd stuff, and her gift to the world (Ymir) (the part of her world that mattered) was not messing with perfection while the rest of the school got heat stroke from the caked gel sticking to their scalps.

Ymir, caught up in being the good, supportive cheer section for Marcel, had forgotten why Pajama Day was sort of okay. Pajama Day just took rolling out of bed and not caring.

Obvious life choice was obvious.

Hindsight went on and had a trip pointing and laughing at foresight missing out on the highest of high tier anticipation fantasies. Pieck would have probably joined in if she had the context, but she hadn't, and Ymir's everything was busy, because Historia, straight out of bed (her _bed_ ), had walked right on by in oversized flannel and faded periwinkle blue cotton, and #blessed did not even begin. Not even a little.

#cursed handled the follow-up.

"We should keep your girlfriend company," Pieck had said.

Pieck was a fucking meddler.

"Splutter splutter," some other idiot might have tried. There was even some appeal to the simplicity, heightened when Pieck swung off with her lone crutch of the day, perfectly unburdened by the thought of some reasoned argument or logic derailing her.

Ymir said, "Sure, let's keep that rumor flame burning until someone calls the fire department."

Pieck's stride didn't hesitate. Ymir's feet kept dogging hers out of sheer habit.

"She is sitting alone in the cafeteria," Pieck said. "Wearing flannel. All while you stare longingly at her from a distance. The only rumor being encouraged is how awful a girlfriend you are." She gazed sorrowfully over her shoulder at Ymir. "Besides which, that much strain is terrible for your neck. In the interest of safety, we should find a better place to seat you."

"Do you really think making sad puppy eyes over medical trauma whenever you want us to do something works?"

"Why ever wouldn't I?"

She kept walking forward.

Ymir kept following with the passing thought that her friends were all bitches.

Historia noticed them long before Pieck smiled sunnily and sat down across from her. She wasn't great at hiding it. Those pretty blue eyes were settled and frozen, staring at her phone so intensely that it was pretty damn obvious her attention was somewhere else. More obvious when they jittered over to Ymir's bare legs.

Turnabout was more than fucking fair, as it turned out.

"Hello Historia," Pieck said. "You don't mind if we sit with you, do you?"

You'd almost think that either of them had a choice when she put it like that. Historia's free hand made a wobbling gesture that no other human being would take as a green light. Pieck's smile turned expectant and targeted Ymir.

The last time she'd been stabbed in the back like this, Kenny'd signed her up for a self defense class.

Ymir set her tray down with a clatter, slipping onto the bench without ruffling any part of Historia. Who she was now sitting next to with her bare legs out. Score, except not, because fucking Pieck.

She chanced a glance at cheerleader babe of the century. With her and her oversized red flannel with sleeves too big even after they were rolled back three times. Hand-me-down city. Half its color was gone, it was a flinch away from falling off her, and Historia was disheveled and perfect and Ymir could think of so many better things to be doing with her mouth in this hour besides eating. Food.

She was wearing bunny slippers. Actual bunny slippers, with ripped ears and fluff popping out of an eye.

Historia's uncle might have been the family felon, but there was something downright criminal about turning bunny slippers into a force of erotic fascination.

"Those look perfect for cartwheels," Ymir said.

Historia was trying to break her titanium phone case with her hand. "They're not bad."

"I'd skip out and go barefoot." She reached down and plucked some of the dusty fluff off, coincidentally sliding closer. She held it out to Historia. "Make a wish."

Historia peeled her eyes away from her phone to look at Ymir. There was a literal inch between their legs. It felt like a damn desert, complete with heat and thirst and mirages of blue paradise.

Another tray clacked down on the table.

"You're finally sitting together!" Reiner's booming voice announced to the entire cafeteria. Because that's what they all needed.

Ymir was all ready to groan and roll her eyes and maybe go a few rounds with King Dork, oblivious ruler to all he surveyed, but with the threat of new company taking up a slot on the bench, Historia nudged their legs together, and basic details like air and insults fell into some dark abyss where a shining beacon of sordid teenage lust put them beyond reach.

"Ymir," Pieck said, perfectly unbothered by Reiner and the unraveling fabric of the universe, "eat something before you die of thirst."

Pock had the fucking worst taste in lust objects.

Reiner grinned and tapped his milk carton against hers, taking for given that their souls had all been bonded in some glorious fusion of rainbow camaraderie over some pamphlets. Maybe he thought he had an in because Historia was only ignoring his friend request with her eyes, and not the magic button. "You two looking forward to the dance?"

"Historia's got a family thing," another voice answered before Ymir could. Marcel plopped himself across from Reiner, leaving a brother-shaped hole between him and Pieck.

"Oh," Reiner said. His whole spine wilted. "Sucks, dude."

He looked like a despondent puppy, poking his dumb plastic fork at his salad.

"We're all still going," Marcel said, digging into his lunch with happy enthusiasm. "Don't worry man, you won't be crowned alone."

Reiner laughed and no one said a peep about how forced it was. Historia was gently intensifying the amount of surface area linking their bodies together, so Ymir should not have been able to care less, and she mostly didn't, but it was still hard to listen to.

"It's nothing serious, is it?" Reiner directed at Historia.

Five Tetris blocks slammed down in a badly stacked row across Historia's phone screen. "A gala," she said shortly. "I'm sure they think so," went out to those more fluent in her body language. So just Ymir.

Reiner's puppy dog face went all understanding, immediately grasping all the intricacies of hating your parents so much you obsessively stalk down articles talking about how much they suck. "They don't want your girl coming along?"

Historia had made it a habit, lately, to keep her phone at an angle where Ymir could see every little thing dancing along the screen without even invading her personal bubble. She did anyway, since Historia wasn't raising any fuss about it, and any second spent closer to her was a second blessed by the cosmos, but the point was, she was getting used to her voyeur privilege.

The screen flashed away, taking the aborted Tetris game with it, and for some stupid fucking reason, even with Historia's leg right up against hers, it stung.

"I didn't ask. I doubt Ymir would enjoy it very much," said the person who was anticipating the weekend the way more balanced people might examine their execution date.

Ymir's mouth did what it usually did when feeling unjustly wronged, and opened.

"What, you don't think I could take it?" she asked.

Pieck's eyebrows jumped up. Marcel's did, too, but missing the hidden unholy glee. Ymir did not care, but they could go to hell while she fished out her shovel and got to digging. Forget the Reisses and their crazy rich person insanity she'd rather die or go to homecoming than spend an evening with—she was almost daring Historia to change her weekend plans from being all alone (surrounded by people she hated) (without her phone) to being all alone with her. Which she wanted, but in a heart-pounding, loins afluttering way she wasn't about to get at some fancy party where her date spent the whole time fantasizing about patricide.

Historia's thigh felt like fire against hers.

She was frowning delicately at the phone she wasn't letting Ymir look at. "I'm not sure why you'd want to," she said.

Reiner laughed, smiling like they were all best buddies for life. "I think it has something to do with you being there," he said, shooting Historia a teasing grin that she was nowhere close to looking at.

He was somehow worse than Porco and Pieck combined. If this was the universe's way of making up for giving Ymir the chance to have her way with the delicacy of the divine sitting next to her, Ymir would gladly fucking take it, but some warning would have been nice.

"Kenny would be cool with it if you wanted to go," Marcel said, ever helpful. "You could leave chaperoning Porco and Pieck to me; I don't mind."

"It's kind of you to think we'll need one," Pieck said, interrupting Ymir before she could explain everything else wrong with her foster brother's sentence.

Marcel smiled the way he did that made him impossible to hate completely. The prick. "Don't sell Porco short," he said. "He won't stay shy forever."

They were atrocious and sappy and Pieck's eyes were actual mush when she said, "One can dream."

But it got them off the track of asking Historia why her girlfriend wasn't going with her to her parents' party, and it only took a few more moments of teasing before her screen came back to Ymir's line of sight. The knot in Ymir's chest loosened, and it wasn't hard to admit that there were worse things than eating crappy food next to Historia and her idiot friends.

Even if most of her Historia thoughts kept going back to the stupid party instead of her legs.

* * *

Hat Day was a waste of time.

Her hair always ended up damp and sticky, Marcel had permanent dibs on the first shower after school, and every other person in the school thought finding something to wear that would poke people's eyes out was the real theme of the day.

Hat Day sucked. It had met its neighbor, Redeeming Value, once, and brutally murdered it. Ymir had solved that case when she was ten and it made nothing better.

Enter the appeal, years later:

Historia walking into school in a backwards snapback was the gayest thing to ever gay the earth, and Ymir was very, very _gay_. In the aggressively homosexual way. Combined with the classic Christmas carol way, because _what_ a fucking present.

Hat Day could stay for the rest of the damn year.

* * *

To the surprise of no one, Ymir turned out to be right. The drama club was going with stealing the football team's jerseys for their skit. Since Thomas had gotten himself sick, Mina had taken it upon herself to steal an entire Bertolt to go with. For anyone in the gym not enthusiastically spray painting signs for the afternoon pep rally from hell, it was high quality entertainment. Bertolt was built for screwing in light bulbs and catching Reiner's balls. Public speaking drifted somewhere south of Neptune in his sphere of interests.

Lucky him, the drama club took all comers, and Mina and Hannah were full believers in everyone having an Oscar-worthy performance locked away inside. Similarly, they were full believers in what crowbars and sledgehammers could do about locks.

"I think he's going to cry," Ymir said conversationally.

Sitting next to her, shading in the terribly inspired 'Go Titans,' sign a less hot cheerleader had chucked at them earlier, Historia barely gave the sufferings of Bertolt a glance. "Is that in the script?"

"They might have to add it in if he keeps looking that miserable," Ymir said, passing the glitter over. "He'd better figure it out soon. Hannah thinks I'm his understudy."

The school's whole theater department thought that too, about every single part under the sun. Memorize a few dozen scripts, and they never let you forget it. Never mind how little interest she had in selling her free time off for rehearsals just so she could go on stage and broil to death under a bunch of broken lighting equipment; she was a valuable resource, and that meant she didn't have a life. She'd gotten stuck playing Ophelia twice last year when Mina took the drama life too seriously and actually broke her damn leg. All anyone on stage would talk about for a week was whether or not it was Armin's fault for bringing up Macbeth when he came in to help out with the lights.

Armin had carefully declined to help out with the spirit week skit. No guesses on why, and no one was blackmailing or otherwise threatening him off the choice.

"You were good," Historia said.

"That is not a sentence I go with, babe."

The sharp corner of the poster Historia was tasked with decorating dug into Ymir's knee. "In the play last year," she said.

Ymir pulled herself away from Drama Boot Camp and quirked an eyebrow at the cheerleader who didn't usually like cheering. "What were you doing watching? I only took the stage for the last two shows, not the one they forced all of you to sit through."

Historia shrugged and popped the cap off the black marker she'd finished with five minutes ago. The G in 'Go' really needed its outline to have that third layer of pitch.

The nice thing about silence with Historia was that it never spoiled and went awkward. The worst that could happen was Ymir having another few moments of study without bothering to save bits of her brain for hearing and complete sentences. On a day where Historia was rocking her cheerleader uniform from dawn to dusk, that didn't come close to being a problem. Team Color Day might have been using Ymir's educational schedule as a fucking pinball, but kicking back in the gym and doodling on poster board for an hour had its perks.

One perk. Three if you spliced definitions, five if you counted optimistically. In decent company that Ymir was too good for, there was just the one: Sitting next to Historia without any of her busybody friends trying to get in the way. Pock had snatched Reiner and Marcel up for a spirited (gag) review of their playbook for the night's game, Pieck was perving on him, and if Connie was still in the school building, color Ymir shocked.

The other cheerleaders were squealing in the middle of the gym, no conceivable bother at their captain actively avoiding them. They'd tossed some face paint her way and split. By the time Ymir showed up, Historia was as comfortably isolated as she wouldn't be at her parents' gig.

"My sister wanted to go," Historia muttered, a minute late to the conversation they'd stopped having. "She likes Shakespeare."

Wow, that was almost something personal. Historia's heavenly wardrobe of sin for the past couple of days already said she didn't completely hate her whole family with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, just her parents, but like most budding sexual relationships, sharing depths outside the physical realm with Ymir wasn't something she really did.

Ymir slid a few inches closer. Levi's waxed floors made it easy. The magnetic pull of Historia's face, drawn in frustrated concentration masquerading as not giving a fuck, made it irresistible. "Your mysterious third Facebook friend with the charity collage in place of an avatar? That sister?"

Historia popped the lid of another marker. With her teeth. Eyes settled deceptively on the sign. "That's her."

"So you have one person to keep you sane during party hours," Ymir said.

"She's not around."

Physics shouldn't have allowed for someone so hot to be so good at conjuring up blizzards. Such were the many curses of being unfathomably dreamy. And unfathomably bitter. Ymir could recognize that feeling from a mile away, and they were sitting close enough that inches would be the better measurement. The quiet sigh Historia let out was almost as visible as the ruffle that passed through an escaped strand of hair from her ponytail. She was wearing her hair up today.

Ymir's hand, mostly without permission, as uninterested as the rest of her in staying away, reached out and tugged on the same strand. Historia's paused its brutalization of the poster board.

How to art clearly wasn't covered in cheerleader school. The ink was too heavy; Historia'd have to drown her hands in the cheap school soap to have a prayer of getting it off. She probably wouldn't bother. Doubtlessly, the rest of the school would mistake it for festive when she hit the field tonight.

Festive didn't fly that well with her. She made it look fine as fuck, but one look at that pretty face called it out for the lie it was. Ymir's fingers wandered over her cheek, unmarked by the paint her squad had left for her. Historia watched them move, blizzard going internal and leaving her frozen.

Porco was kind of a dick, Ymir thought suddenly, to write off all the impervious walls of disinterest as something creepy. Not that she wanted anyone to agree with her about how hot it was. She was. Historia.

 _Hell_ , she was. Hot and all on her own for the taking.

Ymir dropped her hand. "Here," she said, grabbing the cheap face paint markers. Blue and white, like every other thing in the school today. They'd been ripped out of their plastic case without any care, and would probably be drier than the Sahara before the hour was up. "You work on making that sign pretty, and I'll try to tone you down to something human."

"From demon?" Historia asked, tilting her head to give Ymir's fidgety fingers a smoother canvas.

"Sure, if we're talking succubi," Ymir said. Historia's skin was softer than most fleece blankets, and more electrifying than all the static the producing sheep carried around with them.

"Ymir," Historia said flatly. "That's you."

"You realize the more you talk, the harder this is to do neatly?"

Eye-rolling spoke just as loudly, but without the twitching making a mockery of Ymir's art skill. She wasn't the most gifted illustrating artist, but neither was whatever jackass the school had commissioned for their logo. How they got wings from Titans, Ymir would never care enough to know. All that mattered was they were basic shapes, and she rocked basic shapes.

Historia let her work without a word, sitting back and flinching gently at the prodding marker. Ymir used her off hand to keep her chin steady, leaning in more than she had to, but enjoying the unspoken permission too much not to take advantage.

Too bad it was quick work. Also too bad they were in a gym full of nosy teenagers.

"There," Ymir said, finishing off her masterpiece's cheek with a flourish, "putting the cheer back in cheerleader."

She wiped a stray smudge of paint back inside its line, fully intending to tilt her head and grace Historia with a smirk and renewed eye contact, and maybe bury down deep the flutter in her chest at the full-body shudder happening under her hands.

All maybes and intentions halted. Probably in the same jerky stop that Ymir's head made when it realized how close their faces had gotten.

 _Daringly_ close. Slap-a-13-after-that-PG-just-to-be-safe close, with promises of further rating changes.

Ymir had spent some time with Historia's eyes before. A perverse amount of time, according to one rude housemate. She could paint them in her sleep, and more and more often, her dreams took her up on that. She would know that crystallized shade of blue anywhere.

The color she was drowning in was something new. Historia was looking at her with a focus formerly reserved for her phone, lips an inch away, irises dark, and Ymir's hands had gone from their chaste, professionally raunchy grip to fully cupping Historia's face.

That stray coil of hair was falling loose again. One of them would have to move to do anything about it.

Ymir wanted to kiss her.

They were in a gym full of loud, rowdy people. The atmosphere sucked, there was a full container of glitter between them, and Ymir had never wanted anything the way she wanted to bridge the gap and press her lips against Historia's.

The way Historia was looking at her, she'd say it was mutual. The want, and the novelty. She was staring at her lips. Not even subtly.

She was _so_ close. Ymir could feel every push of breath beating into her heart, and nothing of the rest of the world, and fuck it, as far as anyone knew this was her girlfriend and that sounded really, really fucking—

"Yo Ymi—WHOA!"

Ymir jolted away from Historia, her hands understandably couldn't remember how to be without touching her, and an entire strip club's worth of glitter erupted into the air and all over both of them.

TL;DR version?

Fuck Connie.

Murder was in Ymir's heart when she wheeled around to glare at her wide-eyed friend. The one who was supposed to be off smoking pot or climbing the roof with Sasha since it was the middle of the day on a school day. His whole face was coated in blue and white, and he was mid-crouch, reaching down for the marker that had somehow slipped from Ymir's hand and rolled across the floor.

Connie had kept himself alive for a long time, considering his daily lifestyle. He reacted quickly.

"Hey so I'mma take these and get out of your hair you two have fun!"

He pranced off like a spooked deer before Ymir could do more than growl threateningly, sparkly cloud of glitter in his wake, and he was beyond lucky that Ymir had too many survival skills of her own to shout about being clamjammed in a crowded high school gymnasium.

While covered in glitter.

Ymir flicked her hair. Rainbow sparkles spewed from nowhere. The thought that Levi was going to kill Connie before she ever got her hands on him passed by, and she didn't hate it.

Without looking at Historia, she said, "Wanna be bathroom buddies? Getting this crap off is going to take a while."

The responding sigh sounded more like a whimper, and Ymir was not going back to where that observation led until every single person in the building capable of drawing the thought that interrupting glaring homoeroticism was a good idea found themselves escorted out. Other options included finding the best fucking earplugs ever designed and jamming them in her ears, but then she wouldn't be able to hear the inspiring noises, and essentially, all her friends could go fuck themselves.

Ymir was all primed to start her glitter-strewn march out the gym when the familiar pop of a marker cap sounded off, and cool fingers grasped at Ymir's chin. A quick slash of felt dampened her cheek, followed by the rush of a warm body pressed against her front, and the click of a shutter sound effect.

She couldn't not look.

Decked from head to toe in glitter, a significant portion stuck brightly to the cheek Ymir had so lovingly decorated, Historia whisked her phone back out of sight, but didn't bother taking the extra step of pulling away from Ymir. She cocked her head up with a ghost of a smile that removed all nearby oxygen.

"The locker room has better towels," she said.

* * *

No one ever sat near them on the bleachers.

Not in a cute, awkwardly self-deprecating way.

The seats were packed, and there was a solid foot of space between them and anyone else. Pieck had an entire barrier of stolen snacks from Ymir's vouchers built up where a person could have fit, and not a single cramped person was complaining. Pieck brandishing her crutches let her get away with a lot, but hoarding seats at a football game was not on the list.

No, the bizarre culprit of this social phenomenon was Porco.

School's Best Water Boy.

Who was banned from the field during games.

A foot of space was less than anyone wanted from him, but it was homecoming. They were not getting more than a foot away from the caged bull on rampage, and they would all have to live with that.

Ymir, literally cursed to live with that, had given up trying to placate Pock the fifth time he watched Marcel play. The very first game, he was still allowed on the sidelines. One quarter later, he was not. Nothing she or Pieck said would convince him that his brother wasn't seconds away from dropping dead each play. Every tackle brought up new concerns about Porco's blood pressure, and spectator concerns of the worrywart accidentally-on-purpose taking someone's head off.

"That bastard just fouled him!"

"What the fuck was Reiner thinking, they shouldn't be running code falcon here—"

"Where the _hell_ is the flag?!"

He would not stop pacing. He'd barely stopped for the halftime show, and Ymir kicking him hadn't made a difference. Bleachers were not, and never had been, designed for jock-sized idiots pacing back and forth. Neither were Ymir or Pieck. See how much that mattered. Porco was known for actually letting go of Pieck's hand when she tried holding it during a play. That's still how they kicked off each quarter, but it never lasted. Holding her hand the whole game would involve sitting.

Pieck's version of giving up involved using their combined seats as a lounge bench, with Ymir starring in the role of pillow. Every few minutes she showed signs of life by grabbing a starburst.

Or making quiet comments the rest of the world ignored because they were watching the game or ducking Porco's overenthusiastic arms.

"You have a heart drawn on your cheek," she said.

Ymir was watching the game. "Some friend you are, it's been there for hours."

"As has the glitter." Pieck plucked an offending sparkle from Ymir's shirt, which was actually one of Marcel's spares. Hers was in quarantine. "I suppose she thought drawing it on your sleeve would be too on the nose."

"Bite me."

"With another woman's mark on you? I would never," Pieck said.

Ymir, who was watching the game, was circumstantially bound to staying pointed in the direction of the cheerleader sitting on the sidelines. Her pompoms were splayed haphazardly and not doing a whole lot to hide the LED glow one had picked up. She kept squinting against the stadium lights when she looked up at the nosebleed section of the crowd. There was a game, her phone, and her squad, but it was the blurry mass of people under the blinding lights that kept drawing her. Sure. Good use of retinas.

The blue wing on her face, shrouded in glitter, shone like a fucking lighthouse.

"What's the score?" Pieck asked.

"Porco hasn't stroked out yet, so I'd say we're winning," Ymir said.

"The score, Ymir."

"It's 21-6," Porco barked. His sneakers banged against the bleachers with more energy than the entire marching band section. "We lost a touchdown when Reiner got sacked."

She'd thought she'd caught a chorus of boos under Pock's muttering earlier. Tough break for Reiner; there were maybe three people in their district who could regularly topple him, and two of them were on his own team.

"You could always sit up and watch, if you're so interested," Ymir directed at Pieck.

Pieck stayed nestled in Porco's jacket on top of Ymir's thighs. Her phone was out, half-buried in yellow starburst wrappers. "You three are far more interesting," she said.

Ymir glanced down. "Are you texting her?"

"No," Pieck said, "but I could be. She's watching the game as much as you are."

"You can't even see her from there."

"Context clues and past history precluded that necessity."

Ymir rolled her eyes in disgust, going back to her lighthouse. "Pock's hot and bothered enough without you bringing out the big words, thanks," she said. "And you don't get to cry foul at me staring at Historia when you go out of your way to keep your eyes level with his—"

Pieck interrupted, for the sake of Porco's puritan sensibilities more than any sense of shame. "She dodged the post-game party, you know."

"Is that supposed to surprise me?" She'd taken her parents over homecoming, and Reiner was hosting the post-game party.

"I just thought you'd want to know how many people she'll be around after the game ends," Pieck said. "Making out under the bleachers isn't only for football players."

A flash of warmth hit Ymir's face, boiling point under the ink heart Historia had marked her with. "I value my personal hygiene too much for that."

"I am sure that is what you will say when she makes the offer."

Historia was looking back up at the bleachers. Her phone was clearly still on, and it was playing second string. Ymir lost her retort to Pieck, which was already getting garbled from the memory of what it was like to _almost_ kiss Historia. The thought of an actual kiss, without witnesses, hot and slow and intoxicating, was—fucking worth the hygiene risks, and she was not letting Pieck have the satisfaction.

Ymir watched Historia. The glitter on her cheek and in her hair still didn't match her natural shine, knowing she was watching right back.

Tomorrow's homecoming dance would be in the gym. Gaggles of overdressed teenagers stomping all over the scene of the crime against humanity, one Ymir and no Historia in sight. Everyone and their hormones would be on overload, Porco might finally win his brother some cash and ask Pieck to dance without the bestie excuse, Connie and Sasha would cut up the dance floor, and there would be no Historia.

Since she'd be at home. With her parents, and no sister, and no phone.

Today Ymir had been shot into a blazing stratosphere of want and dumb art projects that made the heart beating inside her chest feel as squishy and soft as the amateur doodle scrawled on her cheek.

Tomorrow sounded fucking terrible before the comparison.

After, it sounded like a basic human rights violation.

There was a minute left on the clock for the football game. Marcel was on the field, no broken bones in sight. Somehow, Pock was still breathing.

Ymir didn't look at Pieck. "Don't let them go home without me."

* * *

Tracking down Historia through the throng of yelling maniacs wasn't too hard, since the first step was to find the place all of them weren't. Tonight that meant the abandoned snack shack, since it made a point of closing ten minutes before the game ended and everyone knew better than to try to argue about it.

With the tired yellowed lights and the boarded windows, all accompanied by happy shouts and bursts of music that weren't the miles away needed to qualify as quiet, it was like something out of most bad teen horror movies.

If Pieck ever asked, that was another reason to keep things chaste for the evening. She couldn't get a kiss without Connie springing up. The first time they had sex they'd probably need to rent a vault.

Historia was sitting on a bench when Ymir found her, strapped to her phone and undoing her ponytail. Ymir made herself known at just the right time for eye contact as her glittering gold hair unspooled, stepping on one of the water bottles someone had dumped on the ground.

Suavely tossing it into the recycling, Ymir swung herself into the empty spot next to Historia. "Hi," she said.

Fucking _hi_.

"Hi," Historia said back.

None of their parts were anywhere near touching. Unless staring this hard counted, and optical fucking was a recognized form of physical intimacy. Ymir was rounding third base with the damn feathers on Historia's cheek.

She still wanted to kiss her. Badly.

"Ralph waiting on you in the parking lot?"

Historia nodded. Her preoccupation with Ymir wasn't so fixed. Her gaze was stroking the glitter in her hair, the heart on her cheek, and the tongue damping her lips all at once. It was A Lot. Probably worth braving the anti-sex blob monsters that lived for moments like this. Definitely worth it, but.

Fuck, how horrifying would it be if there wasn't a reason following that. She'd just be sitting here, next to the most beautiful girl she'd ever met, not making a move, for reasons undefined and undisclosed. It was like something out of Porco's life.

"You hate your parents, right?"

Shutters went up between their ocular affair. Historia set her phone grip to strangle mode. "I wouldn't say that," she said, saying that very loudly.

"Humor me."

Historia looked away. Her phone went out of sight, and the tick in her jaw sent Ymir's mind straight back to the gutter where nothing was ever straight. She really wanted to fucking kiss this girl, and a million other things that could get them cuffed for public indecency, and didn't that image bring up a million more.

"Parents hate me," Ymir said, speaking to the dark hole that Historia's light came from, "and I'm spirited out from this week. Me missing the dance tomorrow isn't going to break anyone's heart."

Historia, slowly, looked back, the shutters cracking open.

Ymir grinned through her shaky heartbeat. "How do you feel about taking advantage for a night?"


	9. Chapter 9

Maybe an actual parent would have wanted more details about what kind of party his bereft, innocent teenager was absconding away to when she could be bonding with her friends and siblings in a night of passably sober revelry.

With Kenny, the conversation went something like this:

"Can I ditch homecoming to feel up a hot babe?"

"As long as no one ends up back in the house while I'm making out with my boyfriend, I physically could not care less."

He didn't mention the boyfriend in words during the actual conversation. He didn't have to. The man might as well have been whistling all week long, asking them how many hours they thought they'd stay out come dance night. He'd conned Levi into being their chauffeur and everything. He got a haircut. Sometimes there really was fucking whistling.

He gave Ymir the green light to go be surrounded by people whose neckties cost more than all of her organs on the black market without so much as a suspicious question. To the untrained eye, it was negligent bullshit that Ymir was happy to exploit.

Years of living under his roof said that he already knew every single person at the Reiss party and had personally threatened at least five of them with murder. Creepy, but if it meant he wasn't badgering her about her life choices, swell.

Too bad a certain other person couldn't follow the example.

There was one side effect of dealing with a parental unit on this that wasn't so great. Cowboy Dad believed, so very dearly, in cleaning up good so the rest of everyone would fuck off. He liked to call this having manners. As someone who'd had to sign paperwork to take on a more active role in not caring what teenagers did, he also thought it was his solemn duty to impart some of these manners to the spawn he could happily disown at will.

Predicted side effects of that included small talk about not pissing off the people who had invited her into their home. Since Historia had been the only one at all interested in her presence there, that wasn't the worst promise she could think about keeping, so fine, whatever, can I go now and so on.

Unfair fucking blindsides included the suggestion ( _suggestion_ , like every other thing Kenny _suggested_ didn't carry promises of life getting very unpleasant if the _suggestion_ didn't see some follow-through) to go out and fetch some flowers to present to Historia's parents when she showed up at the party.

"She doesn't like her parents," Ymir had said. That was a large part of the point.

Kenny had looked at her, unimpressed in the face of logic. "Sunshine," he'd said, "where in the _hell_ do you get the thought in your head that manners are for people you like?"

An hour later Ymir was hanging out in a flower shop, stretching the boundaries of her artistic sensibilities to figure out just how ugly a bouquet she could make. Kenny had stopped just short of making her pay for the damn things, so she had room to work, but there was only so much she could do. The worst combinations she had so far said, "Your daughter has let someone with zero taste into your house, but the good news is they're desperate for you to think they're trying."

What she wanted was closer to, "Fuck you for thinking I care about your approval before fucking your daughter, also fuck you in general," preferably in freshly-picked pastels.

Ymir had never been a flower connoisseur, and turning the notch on her style of aggression back to passive definitely wasn't her speed, but she for pastels, there could be no other form of aggression. From what she knew of the Reiss family, their entire mansion would be covered with the things. Kenny would approve of her commitment to speaking her hosts' language, but she'd have to work extra hard to keep from complementing their color theme.

Her only entertainment for the day was watching Porco freak over how to handle being at a dance in Pieck's proximity. She had time. She was also an efficient multitasker.

Porco's sneakers tapped loudly against the linoleum floor. "She liked the roses last year," he said, nowhere near the rose section. He was looking at peonies.

"She'll like whatever you get her, and they'll be dead in a few days. Stop angsting and pick something," Ymir said, even less interested in his problems than usual. Pieck had sent an innocuous text earlier to remind her that she liked tulips. Hint hint. Somehow they were all still pretending that it wouldn't melt her overly devious, mushy heart to be getting flowers from Pock at all.

Except Porco. He really was that clueless, so cue the hours of fretting over which collection of stems would brighten Pieck's desk best before their inevitable deaths. Accompanied by Ymir for reasons beyond a good laugh and pity, all thanks to their weird non-parent's sense of propriety. Bringing a girl's parents flowers wasn't good manners, it was something out of Victorian era courtship advice bulletins. Near the end, after the two weeks of knowing each other had passed and it was time to ask the patriarch for his daughter's hand.

Ymir thought she had a good idea of how that proposal would go. Awed by her acute flower arranging skills and misled by her tailored garb, she'd receive the father's blessing and it would be rendered immediately moot because Historia would never forgive her for involving him in their love life.

"It doesn't bother you that she's using you to piss off her parents?" Porco had asked, oh, maybe seven times when Ymir broke the news about how she was spending her Saturday night.

"Not anywhere near as much as it seems to bother you," was the only answer to that, and it still took three more tries before he gave up in disgust and stopped blocking the middle of the hallway so she could go to bed.

Porco had weird ideas about family. Namely, that they were supposed to like each other. His blood parents were dead, automatically promoting them and everyone remotely like them to sainthood. His brother was so fervently adored that any first year psych student would gleefully attach a complex to it. He seemed to find it personally offensive that Historia couldn't stand the people who hired her a personal driver.

Ymir would have loved not to care. She'd spent most of the previous night happily not caring. She'd spent most of their friendly afternoon jaunt to the neighborhood flower shop not caring. Pock had responded by making it his life mission to do enough caring for both of them. If he didn't have the stress of not asking Pieck to dance to look forward to, he'd still be ranting her ears off.

"You don't even _want_ to date her!"

That hadn't been worth any response at all.

Ymir looked around at the colorful displays surrounding them. All perfectly designed to suit Porco's purposes of failing to ask a girl out, none of them meant to check off a politeness box that had been summoned out of thin air to make her life more difficult.

Garish wasn't going to play. No matter how badly the bright colors clashed, all the flowers were too healthy and friendly to get away with being used as a fuck you collage. She needed something with contrast to bring out that deliberate eye-gouging quality. Some of the lighter carnations could work. Classy and decorative in a clump, but put them next to something with some flair…

"Ymir?"

Ymir tilted her head Porco's way and walked over to a selection of painfully sunny sunflowers. "What now?"

The follow-up didn't follow through. His shoes squeaked and his jacket rustled while Ymir carefully mapped out her floral offense. Signs pointed to a talk happening.

"I—never mind," Porco muttered.

One of those talks, then. Ymir rolled her eyes and searched out the heliotropes. Past experience dictated no gathering of custom bouquets herself, because the cashier would cry, and that would hold them up, but the second she said she was done and they fetched Pieck her tulips, Porco would be back to questioning everyone else's life choices instead of his own.

"It's too late to be her real date," Ymir said, stopping to smell the roses. "You should have said something earlier if that's what you wanted."

Porco crossed his arms and scowled at the hydrangeas. Somehow they failed to burst into flames. Maybe because he looked closer to bursting into tears.

Ymir took magnanimous pity on her baby brother. "Just do what you always do: Wait for her to ask you to dance, and instead of mumbling and letting her drag you away, tell her you don't want it to be a friend dance. She smiles, your heart melts, you live happily ever after, and I owe Marcel ten bucks."

"Marcel wouldn't bet on this," Porco said, showing off the kind of deep misunderstanding only idolatry could foster. " _He_ likes me."

"That's why he bet on you growing a pair," Ymir said. "Don't go letting your big brother down, now."

Porco sulked. He had a way of doing it audibly.

They were through the purchase of Ymir's custom monstrosity and Pieck's much lovelier tulips before he brought it up again. A true sign of growth; last year he'd started the conversation once and then sworn her to absolute secrecy.

"You think she'd want to? If I asked?"

A flash of Historia's wide eyes under the snack shack lights came to mind. A glimmer of a smile that matched the glitter on her cheek, all of her face lit up by Ymir.

"Sure," Ymir said distantly, "girls like it when you show some initiative."

* * *

"You keep tugging at your sleeves and I'm gonna feel insulted."

Ymir dropped her hand from her suit jacket. "Dressing up three times a year isn't enough to get used to formalwear. Perfect fit or not."

Kenny didn't bother dignifying her with a look. He was driving, and whatever Parenting 101 class he had crashed oh so many years ago had drilled not taking his eyes off the road with children present into his head better than a construction crew. He simply took the next turn, and drawled, "Funny, and here I thought it had something to do with your nerves making a fuss over this girl."

Did no one ever stop to consider that if she wanted their thoughts about this, she'd ask? "Could also be that your shortcut landed us in the middle of nowhere and there's nothing else to do but pluck threads."

"Ymir, if you'd caught a single thread out of place, you'd be crowing about it 'till the end of next month." He took another turn. Second-to-last one, if Ymir was counting. "Find a better excuse or rub two brain cells together and work out how to stop lying."

Ymir rolled her eyes and continued looking out the window. The winding road they were heading down was pure black-and-white movie horror. All they needed was some lightning. If the Reisses hadn't already splurged on it, they ought to invest in a drawbridge and a moat. Great for parties.

Cowboy Dad had volunteered to drive her, and keeping up with his creepy way of knowing too much about everything, had told her they were taking a shortcut he knew before she had a chance to hand over the address. She'd told him she needed to be dropped off at the guest house—which was a fucking thing—so maybe his idea of how to get there could use some help, and got a shrug.

With the look he'd given her bouquet when she presented it, she'd call it a punishment, but passive wasn't his brand of aggression either. Punishments were delivered with a highlighted anvil.

She pulled at her tie. Kenny sighed loudly.

One last turn, and they came back to civilization. Or some over-glammed approximation of it. A large stretch of road away, a gate shrouded in floodlights heralded their destination, and if it had a giant R in the middle of it, Ymir would have a great start to her bingo card for the night's festivities. Historia had written the security code for it down on her hand the night before.

The car slowed halfway down the street, going at the speed society could agree belonged to stalkers or people who didn't know how to read maps.

"You got everything?" Kenny asked for the third time that hour.

'Everything' in this case meant Ymir, the invited one; her phone; the toy she'd brought along for another tally in her win column with Historia; and the gate crashing flowers. "Yeah," Ymir said.

Heading up the slight hill to the cliché gate, Kenny dotted in the code smoothly, and open the spiked monstrosity went. Step one of the night accomplished. Historia hadn't explicitly said that she wanted Ymir to avoid talking to anyone on the property until they laid eyes or other parts on each other, but Ymir could read between the lines. Her invite said to show up an hour early and head over to where the staff wasn't preparing for the party. Until the curtain rose, Ymir was invisible and waiting in the wings.

They drove by the house, also known as an affront to taste so brightly lit that Ymir had to blink several times to confirm that it hadn't been decked in four stories of cheap Christmas lights, and hit the side road that would lead to the guest house.

Ymir had never had much money, but she had trouble imagining a world where she'd look at her grand mansion with its sixty bathrooms and forty bedrooms, and decide that what it really needed was a smaller house next to it. Just to remind the first house how much better it was than everything around it.

Kenny rolled the car to a stop in front of the whipping house, and in a move that said she wasn't the only one feeling the horror vibes tonight, killed the engine. He turned to her with his parent face on.

"A few ground rules before you go in there," he said.

"Was there some reason you couldn't do this at home, or—"

"No drinking."

Ymir unbuckled her seatbelt to slouch more effectively in her seat. "Kuchel was just giving Marcel and Pock this lecture," she said. "If you wanted me to hear it, we could have left five minutes later."

"Sunshine," Kenny said, "you've never partied with rich people before. All you know about these folks is that a girl you like can't stand them, and each one'll have a lawyer on speed dial so they don't catch consequences when they show off for their fancy friends. That's not company you want to lose your wits around. No drinking."

"Great. Next up?"

"No having sex with this girl until you see a clean lab report."

Ymir was too fucking young and too removed from the blood pressure problems Porco had to worry about a heart attack at her age, but for a second her cardiovascular system, built up by all the recent running, submitted to blind horror and slammed her chest with a sledgehammer.

" _What_."

Parent of the Year, showing his usual concern for his offspring, propped his elbow against the steering wheel. Not a sign of remorse or pity in his eyes, he said, "You want to go about devirgining yourself, you do it safely. No letting your hormones go so wild you need a medical consult."

Ymir took a second to pave over her new mental scars. "Right, I'll just send her off for one instead," she said. That's what all the appealing sexual partners did these days. 'I really want to jump your bones, won't you pee in this cup for me?' With a dash of 'my dad wants confirmation that you are as much of a touch-starved virgin as everything you do says you are.' The absolute pinnacle of game.

Kenny was the sort of guy who had probably met sympathy once in a bar and shot it. "You want your bits to fall off, or you want a fun time?"

The bad answer to that was that Ymir just wanted Historia. In a lot of ways and positions, all perfectly lewd. Only when the thought popped up, all she could think of was a marker against her cheek.

"Asking her for clerical proof of how diseased she is sounds like a real riot," Ymir said instead.

"You can't work your way around that, you're too young to be having sex," Kenny said. "Falling head over heels down a flight of stairs is how you get concussions, and I have enough of that to worry about with your brother."

This conversation was a better case for not skipping the homecoming dance than anything the school had ever come up with, and it was unfair to the nth degree that she'd still rather be sitting outside the reject house.

Unquestionably, which meant, put together with Kenny's magic sleuthing powers, Ymir was now promised one more fun conversation with Historia in her future, putting to graphic verbal life all the things she thought about doing to her and couldn't, because they didn't have the right paperwork. Historia would definitely be on board with that. Things to look fucking forward to in the middle of looking forward to fucking.

Cowboy Dad was committed to his parenting course. He could write his dissertation on this feat of manipulation and emotional trauma. Jackass.

"Fine, great, anything else you want to ruin?"

Kenny unbuckled his seatbelt and opened his side of the car. "Your tie needs sorting. Out you get."

Ymir rolled her eyes and stepped out into the night under the shadow of the guest house. Since it wasn't drowned in lights, it was actually capable of casting a shadow. Kenny rounded the car and began his deliberately pointed adjustment of her suit, undoing all of the casual muss Ymir had fidgeted her way into. He saved the tie for last, securing it much tighter than her style called for.

"Anything goes wrong, or you need pickup early, you call. Got that?" he asked.

"Are you trying to make up for not knowing me when I was five?"

His large hands held her head still. "Got it, kid?"

Way, way too committed to the parenting thing. Ymir made a show of sighing, and saluted him with the ugly bouquet of flowers he'd coerced her into buying. "Got it, cowboy."

He pecked the tip of her forehead. "Then you're all set. Have fun, keep the stupid to the minimum, and don't be afraid to use a fake name if someone's too interested." He set her free and clapped her on the back. "Knock 'em dead."

Umbilical cord officially cut for the evening, Ymir sauntered off to the doorstep, respectfully resolving to fix her tie once she was inside.

With Historia.

 _So_ much better than homecoming.


	10. Chapter 10

Ymir looked good in a suit. She looked good in a lot of things, but in a suit? Killer. Ladykiller, specifically. With some nerf darts tossed in instead of bullets to keep the paranoid father figures happy. She looked _good_ , and if the past week had taught anyone anything, Historia liked her looking good more than she liked whatever was zooming across her phone screen.

Historia opening the door and staring at her for a solid ten seconds should have been an evening highlight. One of those memories her head set up private viewings of for a fortnight of dreams hot enough to beat global warming to melting the ice caps.

There was the whole thing of Historia opening the door and staring at her for a solid ten seconds that up and interfered with that.

Fancy parties meant fancy dress. She mostly grew up living in a tailor's house; she understood the glamour life, and saw more pretty dresses and suits in an evening of clearing out the attic than anyone ever needed to play witness to.

Historia, accompanied by herself, would be going to a fancy party tonight. Ergo, fancy dress.

The Historia of it all still gave her some pause. Something about divinity enshrined in a human girl who shown like the sun bothering to come out to play for a little bit. There wasn't preparation for shit like this. The experience came in like a wrecking ball, and Ymir was standing on the front porch like every dumbass schmuck in every teenage romcom ever.

Because _wow_.

Historia was barefoot—and Ymir didn't have that fetish but she was starting to see the appeal—and wearing some kind of sleeveless, silk white top streaked with patterns of gold so thin the light barely caught them. The seams over her shoulders were laces, made of what might have been actual lace, leaving gaps for skin and Ymir's tongue maybe. The black skirt mostly looked like a more expensive version of what she wore every day to school, but what she looked like every day at school was still a vision.

Then to top it all off, somehow, the glittery blue wing Ymir had drawn on her cheek had survived their full day of separation in pristine condition.

She was also staring. Because Ymir looked good in a suit.

Custom dictated something about whose job it was to speak first here. Stepford suburbia custom was less picky, and enthusiastic lying went hand in hand with the opening door, but they'd missed that cue, and besides, Ymir was less than clear on where a mansion in the middle of nowhere fell into that.

She did know that Kenny was watching. "You planning on inviting me in?"

Historia's body jerked laterally back into a plane of existence where she wasn't undressing Ymir with her eyes. Tragic, but Ymir was more into a hands-on approach anyway.

"Hi," Historia said. Not stepping out of the doorway for a solid second of aftermath. When she did remember to move, it was the closest to tripping Ymir had ever seen from her.

"Hey," Ymir said back. She walked through the guest house threshold, downing the first barrier of the night and stepping into the tribute to excessive personal wealth. All white marble everywhere, sometimes with gold trimming. "Nice place."

"Thanks," Historia said. She pushed the door shut, and the warning of Kenny's watching eyes left.

The two of them were alone.

Oh _hell_.

Ymir's palms didn't fall prey to mundane weaknesses like sweat, but they did feel a little like they'd temporarily expanded to Porco sized slabs of meat instead of the exquisite tools they were. She thrust the manners bouquet out in front of her.

"For your mother," she said, before Historia could think for a single second that the concoction was for her. "My foster dad thinks that checking off meaningless gestures is how you don't get thrown out of parties, and he's in favor of us having a good time."

Under the bright lights of the glorious guest house, the flowers looked even more washed out than Ymir could have hoped, but they felt like a wimpy shield against Historia's cursory inspection.

"She'll hate them," Historia said. "She had a florist plan out the entire house. No room for anything extra." Her wandering eyes strayed back to Ymir, very below where Ymir's were. More quietly, she added, "Thank you."

The night could have ended there and Ymir would have called it a major win. Her heart flipped and flopped weirdly in her chest, too large and squishable to stand a chance.

"So," Ymir said. The ludicrous amount of marble meant the harmless syllable echoed. "We have an hour all to ourselves. Did you have anything in particular planned for us, or is it all improv from here on out?"

Something like panic spawned behind Historia's eyes before it was ruthlessly shoved further back. "I could show you the house?" she said. With about as much interest as the question mark implied.

Ymir, being a good guest, said, "Sure."

Oppressive silence was not something Ymir dealt with, but if she didn't know enough about architecture to dispute it, she'd say that the guest house was forged from nothing but extracting that crucial element from all of the guests it had entombed in its—based on the modern HGTV fixtures—very short life.

Historia was right next to her, which killed off most of the bad vibes, but Ymir's nerves were playing to Pock's rhythm, not hers, and every time she looked at Historia in her skirt, they went north of haywire.

Her hair was up. Like it was during cheerleader practice, but without all the sweaty tangles. The smooth blonde looked like it had gone liquid in its softness, and the whole trek up the stairs with her ponytail bobbing up and down was distracting and messing with Ymir's palms and she had no idea what the fuck was happening to her swag but she needed it back.

"My uncle lives here," Historia said suddenly, offering Ymir a foothold.

"He needed a place to stay after the cult mishap?"

Historia's eyes darted to Ymir. Ymir smirked. "Pieck mentioned it," she said. So did about a dozen Lenz articles. "Not in detail, but enough to make it sound like a fun story."

Historia shrugged. Parts of her either needed to stop moving or never stop. Ymir's hormones were fighting a losing battle with themselves. "I don't know much about it," Historia said, "but that's why I transferred out of boarding school. I drank the Kool-Aid."

That brought some sobriety back into the picture. "You were part of your uncle's crazy cult?"

"What?" Historia's hair whipped around, landing to a rest on top of her shoulder. "Oh. No, I meant… I was at his apartment when the police raided it. It was before a meeting, and he had Kool-Aid out. It was after practice, so I drank some." She paused before continuing. "My parents didn't appreciate the rumors that caused, so they had me switch schools."

She didn't need to say whose sake that was for. Historia had a very telling tone when it came to her family. Ymir probably should have asked after that, and played some of the compassionate consideration cards she kept a stock of specifically for this girl, but there was one tiny part of that tale that needed clarification first. "Your uncle served Kool-Aid at his illegal cult meetings."

Historia waited a few more steps. "Uncle Uri has a sweet tooth."

"Babe," Ymir said, "that does not make it sound any better."

Surface annoyance won Ymir a beautiful side eye. "He wasn't hurting anyone," Historia said. "He just…"

"Ran an illegal cult."

"Yes."

"Just checking, but this is one of the two family members you like?"

Slightly more than surface annoyance dug in. "Yes."

"Groovy," Ymir said. "So he's the one I want to be nice to tonight."

Historia's shoulders went positively rigid. "He doesn't have an invitation," she said shortly.

Ymir, walking past a section of photo wall, where there were a dozen or so pictures of what she assumed to be the remaining Reisses, all smiling and hugging happily, couldn't help but make the obvious comment. "Even though he lives here?"

"Yes."

Ymir made the other obvious comment. "Your parents are bitches."

Historia relaxed, and her deeply aggressive expression of neutrality melted, taking what was left of Ymir's higher cognitive function with it. "Yes," she affirmed.

There was a dangerous moment, between being halfheartedly shown Uri's office and halfheartedly shown the room Historia kept in the guest house that her parents didn't want her to have thanks to her uncle's 'corrupting influence,' where Ymir realized that even if Historia kept to that one word for the rest of the evening, she'd be okay with reading the rest of their conversation on her face.

That wasn't a thing that bore thinking about.

She was thinking about it.

* * *

For all the parental talk Ymir had with Historia, she'd never really pictured meeting her parents, except to maybe introduce her fists to their faces. Meeting the parents was something girlfriends did, or friends, or otherwise non-sex buddies, or people who actually gave a damn about their parents' thoughts on who they hung out with.

If she'd bothered to picture it, it would not have been two zombie-eyed people in their Sunday best waving hello to their daughter, their daughter's date, and informing them both of the seating chart before striding off to talk to one of the waiters.

"This is Ymir," Historia had said, in the middle of no one else acknowledging Ymir's presence.

"My date," she had added, when that only got vague nods and a pushy reminder to please be sure to sit in the appropriate space. Somewhere down the line, her fingers had tangled themselves with Ymir's, and that didn't even make the list of surreal out of body experiences the Reisses caused in the course of a single conversation.

"Very nice to meet you," Mr. Reiss had said. To Historia, he'd added, "It's good you're making friends."

That was it. That was Ymir's involvement in the hellos, which could not more plainly be goodbyes. Historia's mother had barely said thank you for the flowers. An irritated line that might have once been a mouth had formed on her face, and she'd handed them off to some gloved individual in a suit who looked deader than she did.

"Holy shit," Ymir had breathed, standing alone in the house's grand entrance hall, next to a Historia who was vibrating with her proximity to intense violence. "Lenz undersold it."

Walking to their assigned seat in the ball room, which said everything Ymir could ever think about what those people were, Historia hadn't said a word. Opposite the hand holding Ymir's, enough muscle backed her tiny fist that if she'd had her phone, it would have been in smithereens.

That gave Ymir a little too much time to look around the place.

More white, more gold, more chandeliers than heads they could drops on, full of more crystal and light bulbs than anyone in the history of ever needed, and family photographs as far as the eye could see.

They weren't like the ones in Historia's uncle's prison yard.

They reminded her of homes she'd been in, before Kenny decided to play hero. Here are our blood children, whom we love dearly. Over there, if you squint, you will find our charity cases.

If Ymir squinted, she could see a few shots of Historia tucked away.

She hoped Mrs. Reiss fucking hated her flowers.

Quiet seething being the theme of the night, they were both seated around a table clothed in an immaculate white tablecloth before Ymir judged that Historia had crossed over into the realm of sulking, and as devastatingly hot as the extra tension made her calves look in those heels, Ymir wasn't playing arm candy so Historia could ignore her for her terrible parents the whole night long.

"I meant it when I offered you up my body for the night," she said. "Feel free to do whatever you want with it." She carefully inserted a dramatic pause, letting Historia jolt fully back to the present. "You'll probably have a better time with that if you don't forget I exist."

Historia immediately tore her hand out of Ymir's—which, rude—and flashed it down to where she quickly realized the pocket containing her phone wasn't. She closed her eyes and took a long, silent breath.

"Sorry," she muttered.

"Thanks," Ymir said.

She eyed the hand dangling between them for a moment, decided what the hell, she needed to do it before the doors opened and the awful parents were joined by awful party guests anyway, and grabbed it.

Historia tried to lace their fingers together the instant they touched, but Ymir slipping in the gift she brought along for reasons outside of some skewed view of propriety stopped the movement. She looked down, confused, and Ymir pulled back.

She'd found it in one of Porco's drawers, since it'd used to be Levi's drawer. Foster dad of the decade didn't know how to throw anything out, and was paranoid enough to keep a ready stock of batteries for every device he had ever owned, and several he wouldn't be caught dead with.

"Since you can't ditch us all with your phone tonight, I thought you could use the next best thing," Ymir said. The fiery glint of candle lighting their table caught the orange plastic in Historia's hand and gleamed.

Tamagotchis were a blight upon the planet and Ymir was a hopeless deviant for thinking they had any value whatsoever, Pock had once shouted, pretending not to be traumatized by that one time he went to summer camp and forgot his under his bed.

From the burst of warmth that hit Historia's eyes and washed over Ymir like an anvil, she'd say that Porco's opinion was, as usual, unique to him and not something that needed listening to.

Historia swapped it to her other hand and returned to holding Ymir's. Gently, this time, without the barely repressed rage. Ymir, whose usual pattern with Historia was to keep her eyes on her at all times even when she was burning brighter than the edge of a solar eclipse, found herself observing the table.

There was a chance she was in trouble.

She took her luck where she could, and said a silent prayer of thanks to no one when the doors opened and the partygoers arrived before Historia could do more than look at her like that.

* * *

What Historia's parents had failed to mention, in keeping with their need to hold the record for worst ever of all time, yes even then, was that the seating chart was designed with only two guests in mind. One, really, when taking into account Ymir's near-invisibility in their eyes.

So while everyone else happily mingled with their friends and took the seats that made their cold, dead hearts smile most, Historia just happened to be seated right next to the buffet table. Also known, to the more sophisticated company of the evening, as the less obvious bar.

Someone would have to work up the heart to tell them that when their alcohol tolerance was that low, nothing could keep it from being obvious. Ymir had a hunch she was going to be the someone.

Placed so close to the only action the evening was providing, some other things started to become obvious.

"Oh Historia, we're so happy to see you out again. After that business with that uncle of yours…"

"Public school. Well, it looks like you're making it work. You'll be off to college in no time."

"I hear you kept up cheerleading! Very fine, very fine!"

"Is this your friend? Oh sweetheart, look at that! She's made a friend!"

"Awful, awful business."

"What is that on your cheek? Does public school not let you use soap?"

"You look five seconds away from murder, but it's very important to your parent to give all of their friends who hate them a chance to say that their daughter has survived her ordeal with her evil uncle, so nice that you're seated right next to the buffet so no one misses out on saying it."

Ymir was paraphrasing.

Historia was seething and providing color commentary whenever they were given a moment's peace.

"Dimo Reeves," she said, pointing out a tired man keeping a firm grasp on a younger, less tired man. "He broke so many factory regulations last month that he had to pay one of the fines. His son got kicked out of school for stealing a goat, so he transferred to the school he stole the goat from."

"Mr. Grice is in politics. He uses every one of these things as a fundraiser."

"Theo Magath. He's sleeping with the baseball player who lent Petra Ral the baseball bat she used to destroy one of the Fritzes' cars."

"That's Nile Dok and his wife. He covered for Petra. He hates parties. He only comes because his in-laws talk about him when he doesn't."

"That's Kiyomi." Historia went back to watching her Tamagotchi more than the room with great deliberation. "Stay away from Kiyomi."

What she didn't say about any of them was how half the crowd's beady eyes were on Ymir. Ymir wasn't going to bother pointing it out. At regular intervals, Historia squeezed her hand with too much mindlessness to be unintentional. If Ymir were a generous, kind-minded person, she would have blamed the flames that were still in her hair from the failed experiment known as spirit week. She'd debated over whether it would be better or worse to touch up the fading dye, and if her role of the evening was to be better or worse, then her good memory made the choice for her. Historia had told her the flames looked nice that first day. Ez. The back of her head was lit up like a candle.

Ymir was not a generous, kind-minded person, and while Historia shamed all of the guests with past crimes, Ymir watched the body language and reported back on which echelons of upper society were lying their asses off to their conversation partners.

Spoilers: It was most of them.

"We should steal all their money and run away together," Ymir said absently as a tall, skinny guy auditioning for the role of Slenderman what with how many scarves he'd draped over himself ordered one of the servers passing by to fetch him a drink.

"…I have money," Historia said.

Her heart needed to stop hopping up and down every time Historia talked. Ymir's throat dried, again, and she took a nonchalant chug of water, again. The waiter who kept magically sliding into existence to fill her cup had taken to sending her encouraging smiles, which she did not need. If he had any eyes at all he'd see that she was owning the handholding without anyone's help.

"Are you really going to kill my dream of pulling off a heist? Really, Historia? You're gonna be that girl?"

Historia's mouth twitched briefly out of its stormy scowl. Ymir's heart continued to do the thing. She'd never been gladder to be away from Pock and Pieck.

Diverting her attention, because the eclipse metaphor was applicable in all the wrong ways tonight, Ymir went back to making fun of the rich people she wasn't on a mission to bang.

Her eyes caught trouble.

Squeezing Historia's hand for attention, and because she could, she played lookout. "Sophisticated blondie, six o'clock. Nice suit and hair that looks like it's trying to copy yours." She glanced at the hair in question, since how could she not. "Doesn't come close."

Her carefully chosen words of charm had zero effect. Historia had turned around and brought an arctic tundra with her.

"Willy Tybur," was all she said.

Before Ymir could ask if that was the same Tybur whose sister had mauled a lady with her stiletto, the man whose name would have been pronounced in caps even if names weren't written that way was upon them.

"Historia!" he said with enough bright cheer and familiarity that Ymir very strongly understood Historia's radiating desire to see him in a trash compactor. "It's good to see you looking so well. Some of us were worried that you'd never see the light of day again after being sent away to that school of yours."

He smiled like he had once met a Marcel and liked the look.

Meanwhile, in a show of affection Ymir did not know what to do with, Historia placed the Tamagotchi on the table before her hand destroyed it. Her grip on Ymir's stopped shy of bone-crushing.

Ymir wasn't sure what it was that made her speak up. There were a lot of options, all in keeping with the dignified consort feel she was vibing. What she was sure of was that this was a guy whose tears would definitely work as an aphrodisiac.

"I think you've got that backwards," Ymir said politely. "Boarding school is the one where they throw children in dungeons and let them play with rats. Public school's legally required to release people."

His smile turned on her. "True enough. I can't tell you how many of my classmates would have benefitted from fresh air. We're all hoping this will be a healing experience for Historia."

"Because you're so concerned."

"Naturally," he said. "I know how close she and Uri were. Such a public rupture… in our lives I'm afraid such encounters are inevitable, but we would all prefer them to be less grim. Frieda always worried—"

The dots connected, and Historia was standing from her chair, twisting around so she wasn't letting go of Ymir's hand. "Don't talk about my sister," Historia said, voice like oddly erotic thunder. "Our lives aren't your concern."

Willy raised his hands in peace. It wasn't very effective. "I'm sorry, Historia," he said with a sincerity he probably believed. "All I meant is that I'm glad to see you're doing okay. I know this has all been very rough on you." He smiled at Ymir. "I'm sure your lady friend would agree."

Now.

Ymir did not, in concept, have a problem with Historia straight up murdering a dude. She would even go as far as to say that it would be really fucking hot, and very little had been done to suggest the victim wouldn't deserve it. She also had fewer problems with being called Historia's lady friend than she was in a rush to examine.

She still figured the best thing to do in this case was to grab Historia before she could try to body slam someone twice her size, and if it put her in the position of holding Historia's entire body directly against hers, that was all good.

 _Really_ good.

Historia's very stiff back and charging feet stilled, and Ymir was not giving this guy a free peep show, so instead of pulling her girl even closer and spinning her around, she ducked her chin on top of Historia's angelically soft hair and grinned.

"I'd say I'm the only one who gets to be rough on her these days, Mr. Tybur," she said. Politely. Trying not to feel too smug about the dull flush of red in Historia's non-blue cheek. "Thanks for dropping by."

To his limited credit, Willy seemed to spot the deathflags in his future if he stuck around. He smiled congenially, and gave his head a little tip that made Ymir think he probably walked around wearing a stupid hat usually. "I hope you both have a pleasant evening. It has been a… pleasure, miss."

He walked away without taking anything from the table. Just as well.

That left Ymir with a very dolled up, very hotly angry Historia in her arms. With neither of them in a particular hurry to change any of those factors. Ymir liked holding her. She was small, but so warm, and solid, and made of silk.

Trouble. Nothing but trouble.

They stood there long enough for more judgmental staring from rude rich folk to pass their way. The joint venture of not giving a fuck felt like a real bonding moment.

Ymir tilted her head down to eye Historia.

"So he and your sister…"

Death was summoned to her angel's gaze. "Ymir."

"No judgment, I'm sure her dating pool couldn't have been that—"

Historia made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat and spun around, keeping Ymir's arms trapped snugly around her. She was really close. Funny how that happened. She was also in heels. Party. Rich douches. Dress clothes.

Her lips were a whole inch closer than Ymir was used to.

She was staring into Ymir's eyes, but the promise of a flicker downward fluttered by periodically. It turned the dial up on the blistering heat reigning behind her expression, and Ymir's ears burned. She still wanted to kiss her.

If they just kept staring at each other like this, magnetism would do the job for them. Something softer than the steel in Historia's gaze was peeling it back, and irritated focus was giving way to the same cloudy dusk that overtook her eyes in the gym.

She could kiss her. Historia would let her. Historia would kiss back.

Neither of them moved.

Their friendly waiter came by to refill their water. Historia's cup was just as empty as Ymir's. The soft clink of expensive ice cubes sounded a little like music, and Ymir had the bizarre thought that if they had stuck with homecoming, this would be the part where they danced. All night. Like this.

It almost sounded worth all the trouble of the stupid crowning, put like that.

Historia's head fell to Ymir's chest with a soft thump. Ymir took the chance to wrap her arms around Historia more fully, draping her hands over her skin and melting a little bit at the touch. With a pretty damningly defined hint of romo.

"Don't be an ass," Historia mumbled.

"No promises," Ymir said.

The alternative was admitting part of her soul was considering, a little, all the many, many, dignity impaired promises she would gladly make if it meant keeping Historia in her arms. The alternative sounded like a little much for them.

* * *

Like all good things, sometimes bad things came to an end too. Such was the case with Ymir's very first Reiss party. She'd had her fill of poisonously rich treats, kept her liver safe from the questing snares of alcohol, got Historia to stop looking like a pretty blonde storm cloud more than a few times, and made all sorts of people she didn't care for clutch their pearls in censure.

Now the hour was late, and it was time to ditch the losers and reunite with her kind of losers.

Most of the very annoying guests had lurked back into their Porsches by now, but a few had stuck around, and she could feel their eyes on the back of her head, wishing the flames were real.

Historia's hand, kept tight around hers, warded off a lot of the bad energy, but they both still knew to glare at all the right people. Ymir hoped Lenz did an article about each one personally. Rich people never got tired of adding one more cherry on top, and this was their shindig, so she felt entitled to a bit more fun before the end.

Lingering by the entryway, temptation was calling at her to create her own.

Some other feeling, the one that had been playing her heart like a bongo all night long, was already sketchily sidestepping off into the dark. It was annoying, but Ymir kept looking at Historia, kept thinking about how she had technically been her date, and now they were technically standing in the doorway before where they'd part ways, and sketchily sidestepping off into the dark felt exactly like what she had to do to keep from exploding.

After a much more expansive silence than they'd spent most of the night in, Historia spoke up.

"Do you want this back?"

She held out the orange Tamagotchi.

"Keep it," Ymir said. "Porco thinks it's Satan and no one else cares."

"Thank you."

More silence.

Ymir should never have let Marcel and Porco enter so many romcoms into the movie night pool. A good half of them were playing back through her head. Her palms were going traitor again.

Giving the tingling at the back of her neck a little more attention, she turned to locate one of the many eyes she'd felt on her all night. Two, but who was counting. It was something to do.

She hit the jackpot with the man of the moment. Halfway across the hall, he couldn't seem to decide which was more worthy of his glare; the clasped hands, the flame dye, the face paint, or just both of their pretty faces that close together.

After a night of being relatively good, Ymir took great joy in flipping him off.

"You said whatever?" Historia said abruptly.

Ymir jolted back to more squishy arenas of thought. "What?"

Historia was looking at her.

"For tonight," she said. "Whatever I want? With…" Her eyes trailed down. A very long length. Then up again.

Ymir was not physically pinned to a wall.

There was, however, a wall she was leaning against, and movement didn't seem to be happening. Unless the slow ease of Historia's body ever closer to hers counted. And she wasn't imagining it. She wasn't used to Historia at this height, after all. She was tiny. Typically very far away from Ymir. High heels were probably a major factor in some kinds of optical illusions.

"Yeah," Ymir heard herself say. "That's what I'm here for."

Historia was still looking at her.

All of her.

There was still a room of people, even if it wasn't full. Her curfew was up soon; they'd both be turning into pumpkins, or whatever pumpkin equivalent goddesses had.

The glitter on Historia's cheek winked up at Ymir.

How was she _so_ damn beau—

Historia kissed her.


	11. Chapter 11

It was a quiet drive home.

Ymir was in one piece, so Kenny used his parental voodoo instead of doing her the honor of prying. In the absence of said prying, she felt less of a need to bring up the bright hickey on his collarbone catching every single streetlight, or why his shirt was that unbuttoned to start with.

He shared the consideration and stopped short of putting anything he had or hadn't seen to words.

The mock parental cycle of love was complete.

Ymir's phone was off. She'd switched it off for the party, and because she didn't need to be pinged every three seconds about who was dirty dancing with whom during homecoming. Connie and Sasha both had an established history of gossiping at her when their overexcited selves couldn't stand only having each other to share the latest tawdry couplings with. Pieck was even worse, given the proper motivation. Winding up Porco all night pretty much shoved her headfirst into that category.

Without all of them getting on her nerves, there wasn't much left to break the silence besides talking.

Hence the dead silence packing them on home. Some conversations were worth saving.

Her lips still felt warm.

Insanely warm. Warm enough to foster concerns of her running a fever if her thoughts could reach spaces like that after remembering why they were so warm. Hot kind of warm. Hot like someone else she knew had left a piece of herself on them.

Her heart hadn't stopped beating since, which was all normal and fine for being alive, but usually she didn't notice it.

They made it home, Kenny unlocked the door, Ymir waltzed on through, and it was like no dates and exchanges of bodily fluids had happened to either of them. Marcel—the idea of Pock remembering was laughable—had left the hall light on, and hints of the dead lamp in the living room flickered further inside.

Daddio patted her on the head and went up the stairs. Ymir wandered forth to find the two homecoming victims sprawled out on the couch. Both their ties and jackets were tossed over the patched easy chair, and they were snoring away in their rumpled shirts without a care in the world. They hadn't even bothered changing in their rush to wait up for her. Dances wore them out faster than football practice.

Ymir hopped up on the couch arm and bopped Porco on the head. His nose twitched. She poked him again. And a few more times when he made it difficult, prompting thoughts about the likelihood of Porco dying if there was ever a fire in the middle of the night.

After forever, his eyes opened blearily.

Ymir saved them both some of the time he'd cost with his log imitation.

"I think I like her."


	12. Chapter 12

She'd kissed her.

She'd really kissed her.

Historia was on her bed, where she had been for an hour. There was a pillow placed firmly over her face. She was still in her clothes, barring the heels. The heels that put Ymir within kissing range. She hadn't moved after throwing them off and sinking into her bed.

She'd kissed Ymir.

Giddy laughter wanted to bubble up. A bright burst of sunlight in a grey, darkening world. Then all the darkness came back and she was alone in her room. Screaming felt as close as laughter.

She hadn't known, exactly, that she was going to kiss her. She'd thought about it once. Twice. Most of the night. Most of yesterday.

That wasn't the same as doing it.

Very not the same. Fantasies couldn't catch the cocky smile or the way her eyes caught fast on Historia. They didn't undo the rest of the world while her heart pounded like a drumline. They didn't have the slow expansion of her pupils or the warm hum of her breath or. _Any_ of what happened.

They probably would now.

They still wouldn't be the same.

Historia hadn't known where to put her mouth, or her hands. She knew the basics, but she had a hard time thinking when Ymir was that close, and everything had felt too tingly, and it was worse and better than her first backflip.

Their noses had bumped for a second. Historia had decided both hands on Ymir was best. For balance. Neck and shoulder. So she had some help to leverage herself up. Ymir was tall. Unfairly, distractingly tall.

She really hadn't known what to do with her lips, so she just… kissed her. Like she'd thought of doing. Her body had better control of itself when she let it take over. Her lips had found Ymir's, and they were soft and open and shocked, and. Wow?

Was there supposed to be that much wow?

Historia could have stayed there forever. She had the legs for it. She'd wanted to. She'd wanted to keep kissing Ymir until the sun came out.

That… hadn't happened.

Historia pulled the pillow off her head and stared up at the ceiling.

Ymir was bad at everything. Talking to people. Showing affection. Bad, bad, bad, like all of the things Historia thought about doing to her on a daily basis. All the things everyone at the party thought they were already doing. The things they weren't doing because Ymir was bad at asking. Seducing. Only somehow she wasn't. Historia was seduced. Ymir just wasn't doing anything about it. They were both bad at this.

Ymir hadn't kissed back.

Historia wanted to die. A little.

A lot.

She knew Ymir liked her. Maybe not like-like, or any of the other overwhelming feelings Historia had whenever they were in the same room, but physically, there shouldn't have been a problem. Ymir wasn't subtle.

She had looked so surprised. Good surprised, Historia had hoped. How were you supposed to tell? Historia hadn't realized bad surprises were possible with Ymir. Ymir was always surprising her, and it was always good. Always. Every time she came close and stayed added to the list.

Maybe that was it. She wasn't used to being the one surprised.

Was it really a surprise, though? What had she expected, showing up looking like… that?

So much that.

Historia should have jumped her in the guest house. They never should have gone to the party. Uncle Uri was out on his date, and no one would have wanted the scene that looking for them caused. They could have stayed away and…

And.

That was still something Ymir wanted, wasn't it?

Historia wasn't naïve enough to think they'd be girlfriends, or get married, or have a honeymoon in some hotel with soundproofed walls, or even have all of it happen more than once, but she did think that Ymir wanted to have sex with her. Historia wanting more than that didn't have to mean nothing happened at all.

Maybe Ymir disagreed.

That would be the worst.

Historia rolled off her bed and dug through her nightstand for her phone. She ignored the text about writing a piece on the night's gala. She wasn't going to ruin a night of memories by bringing any of _them_ into it. Flicking mindlessly through Frieda's itinerary and stalking Ymir's Facebook page to see if she had said anything that might explain any of how she was feeling sounded like a better end to the evening.

There were twelve alerts from Pieck.

Odd.

There was also Reiner's friend request.

Historia stared at it. She couldn't explain why she hadn't deleted it yet.

His father had been at the gala tonight. She wasn't supposed to know that, but she wasn't supposed to know a lot of things.

He'd glared at Ymir.

Her and Ymir. All night. Before Ymir flipped him off and Historia couldn't help herself.

Historia thought about Reiner grinning when Ymir came up behind her and draped a possessive arm over her shoulder. How he'd bragged about making it out of the house to get the Pride stickers he wallpapered his locker with, then slammed it shut when Bertolt started walking over. She thought about fathers.

She pressed the Accept button on Reiner's request with a savagery that too many people she'd seen tonight deserved and escaped. Maybe she would write an article.

Instantly another alert brightened her screen.

 _how was the date!_

…Was ignoring people ruder when you were friends? Or did that make it okay?

Another message from Pieck popped up, and Historia clicked it out of habit and delayed flight response before it really registered.

A collection of dark photos, surrounded by a color scheme Historia had supposedly had a role in choosing, spat themselves out at her. Brief glances declared them to have something to do with crowns, Ymir's foster brother, and Reiner. Standing about as closely together as she and Ymir had earlier.

Historia blinked.

She peered more directly at one of the photos.

She checked Pieck's comment under it.

 _a gift to complete your date night_

 _show her these and she will love you forever_

Historia didn't have to think about it.

Five seconds later the Instagram link was sent to Ymir. With a smiley face.

Love was probably out, but she'd take what she could get.


	13. Chapter 13

Ymir and feelings had a great relationship. They said hi, they did Sunday brunch, smiled for the camera, then went on their merry way. No muss, no fuss, no clubbing anyone to death in a back alley.

That didn't mean she wanted them for a house guest.

Porco, in typical Porco fashion, had been no help.

"You kept saying you didn't like her."

"We're a little past that, try to keep up."

"But you _said_ —"

For someone who'd been so offended by the idea that a person could want a strictly lustful connection with someone, he took the idea that Ymir might have been underselling the value of Historia's pretty eyes very hard. Ymir could have mustered up an imitation of sympathy, but when she'd confided in him, the idea was that he'd be able to offer some kind of help, and his starting contribution was mainly making his eyes go as wide as his mouth.

Then the morning after hit, and he'd given a shot at trying. Enter Ymir having finished up brushing her teeth in the cramped bathroom while she gave her beloved housemate a few token moments that more awake people would appreciate for thinking.

"So," Porco had said, speaking through gravel, "you like her."

"Sure seems that way."

"Historia."

"Are you going to be like this all day?"

Porco had dunked his head in the sink and come out splashing water all over both of them. Marcel had crashed so hard from the homecoming backlash his bed was still buffing out the dents, so for a brief segment of time soon to be all but erased, all this was his fun to miss. With a breath Ymir hoped he'd found fortifying, Porco wiped his face raw. "How badly did you screw up the kiss?"

Ymir rolled her eyes and came up with several biting retorts that made him cry, then they never spoke of it again.

If fucking only.

No, what had actually come out was, "I didn't screw it up, I was savoring it. Standing still for romantic moments is what you're supposed to do."

Porco had mumbled something which the record could not verify was actually, "Not that still," so murdering him would not be the easily excusable brand of crime Kenny let slide, and Ymir still, in theory, had someone to bounce the wondrous trauma of emotion off of.

"Did you even talk to her after?" he asked.

"And ruin the mood?"

Porco had dropped his towel and looked close to a stroke. "Are you _for real_?"

"Between the two of us," Ymir said, flossing with truly admirable precision, "my date's the one that ended on a kiss." A kiss which, Ymir had found out at that point, was not a good thing to reference if she needed more words to complete a burn. Because Historia. Historia and lips and warmth and her soul melting into a puddle. That was how the brain worked now. She rallied like a champ, though. "Unless you're holding out on me, you don't have much room to criticize."

On another morning, a very closely following morning in fact, the pale look of panic that bunny-hopped across Porco's face would have been of interest. In a twist of very bad luck for one of them, they'd been living through this particular morning, where Ymir was trying not to hit the ground too hard from cloud nine, and Porco had not yet been embarrassed into silence.

"Maybe you should check your phone," Porco had said, sure to have nightmares about the suggestion for another week. "Thing's almost surgically attached, she might've sent you something to work with."

All previous arguments to the contrary, Ymir had known by then that she was in some massive fucking trouble with the Historia situation. Her brain periodically turning to sappily romantic fuzz all night long when she was supposed to be sleeping was a good hint. So were the nine thousand other fluttery problems that came before.

But when she'd turned her phone back on and found a waiting link to Pieck's homecoming photos, she'd fallen down a whole new rabbit hole of emotion, and fuck Pock's comments, if Historia had been in the room, she would have kissed her until she was the frozen one.

Needless to say, the conversation took a turn after that.

A turn Porco was still trying to skid out of as they walked to school the next morning.

A bright, crisp fall day, sunlight gleaming through the lingering fog, and their sneakers squeaking through the morning dew trapped on the weeds breaking up the sidewalk. A fitting setting for someone to aid in burying himself.

"Your girlfriend," Porco said acidly, for the fifth time, glaring so ferociously at Ymir, "told Pieck she could collect the Homecoming Queen crown for her. Pieck's legs were acting up, so she gave it to me, and the King and Queen dance is _traditional_. It has nothing to do with anything!"

"Oh my gosh you two are so cute together," Ymir said for the seventh time, scrolling delightedly through the shots Pieck had collected of the crowned royals dancing through the night.

Pock made a failed grab for her phone.

"Aw, and here your boyfriend is with Marcel. It's so nice when everyone gets along."

That locked Porco's jaw right up, along with his fists and his gait. Probably because he could see the same smitten look Reiner was wearing in the Marcel pictures as he didn't see in their pictures together.

Ymir didn't mean to have a feeling about that, but she cuffed Porco on the shoulder anyway. "Don't be like that, they're best friends. It's easy for a budding relationship to feel threatened by that kind of love, but I have faith—"

" _Enough_ ," Porco said.

Ymir shrugged as gaily as she did everything. "Suit yourself. You should thank Pieck; she made sure to get your good side."

He would, knowing him. With her around to nudge the thought into his head. Some of the stony redness taking over Porco's everything backed off to plain ol' brick redness. With an extra shoulder hunch for pity points.

Ymir didn't need the pictures to know that he'd failed completely to turn his date into a date. She also didn't need photo evidence to know that didn't mean anything, because Pieck took care of Pock's heart the way more sensitive people looked after a baby bird, but Porco didn't know a thing about relationships. He'd be riding the sad until the next time Pieck smiled at him.

Or the grudgingly bitter. "What are you going to do about Historia?"

Ymir kept her eyes on her new prized possession. Pieck had caught the one nanosecond of Porco actually smiling when Reiner dipped him. "Are you back on that?"

Porco had the herculean nerve to roll his eyes. "Like you ever left?"

There was also a great shot Pieck had convinced Marcel to take of all three of them, both boys playing diligent honor guard to the lady joining their midst. The angle wasn't perfect, but Pieck's contented smile and Porco's dopey one next to Reiner's bursting grin made up for it.

"You barely even thanked her for those things," Porco was saying. "Do you have some sort of plan?"

Ymir pulled a wrinkle out of her sleeve absently. "Things have been going fine so far. Why would I need a plan?"

The flummoxed silence was gratifying, but it didn't last.

"You like her," he said, more confused than horrified for once.

"Right."

"…Shouldn't you tell her that?"

"I don't think dodging a confession for over a decade makes you an expert." Ymir kept going before Porco's softened nerves could pick up too bad of a bruise. "Look," she said, "it isn't something to rush into. I'm not gonna switch gears on her out of nowhere. She might not even be into that."

The photos on her phone lost some of their luster with the words. To go with the excruciating pang in her heart saying them caused. The least punkest of rocks.

Porco, responding the way he usually did to being mined for mockery for a solid day due entirely to his own actions, said, "You mean what if she's been a pervert all along who's only interested in you for your body?"

"Hey. Hey. Hey Pock. Fuck off."

* * *

She was not going to make it weird.

There was no reason for it to be weird.

The whole school already thought they were a thing.

They'd done it last week and no one cared.

Ymir was standing at the end of the fucking cafeteria line, wondering why in the fuck her legs couldn't seem to move. Her only answer was an image in the back of her mind of what happened at one of the dances she'd actually attended, watching Porco watch Pieck. She didn't care for it.

Historia was already seated, and looking at her was on par with how multiple lightning strikes probably felt.

The last time they were in the same room they'd kissed.

… _Fuck_.

How the hell was this doing this to her? Historia had always been beautiful. Her hair had always had that shine to it. Her legs had always gone on for days despite being a modest half-day, at best. Her arms always looked incredible. The very faded blue face paint on her cheek hadn't been around long, but there wasn't anything uniquely special about it. They hadn't even kissed that time. Wanted to, very much, and oh hell that just put the time the want had entered reality back, and—

She always looked up and let the world stop when she saw Ymir.

So it was just going to be fucking weird.

 _Okay_.

Ymir made her legs work. She made them drag her over to the table, and she made herself sit down, and she didn't make herself stop thinking about kissing Historia because having all the romo didn't mean she was suddenly a saint.

"Hey," she said, sliding across the bench. "Thanks for the pics."

"No problem," Historia said.

Her phone wasn't in her hand. The Tamagotchi was.

Ymir had a very serious problem. One the giant lumps taking up root in her throat were not helping with. Such a problem. A problem an overabundance of bad pop songs were written about.

Historia wasn't going to bring it up. Ymir couldn't call that a good thing, but she wasn't going to complain. Who was to say there was even a reason to bring it up, when the whole stated excuse had been getting under her parents' skin. A kiss here or there in the pursuit of pissing people off wasn't anything at all.

What the hell was she supposed to do if Historia believed that?

What else was Historia supposed to think, when she went for a kiss and got jack back?

What if pissing people off was the only reason she'd gone for it?

 _How did people do this?_

"Did you have a good… yesterday?" Historia asked.

"Yep," Ymir said, like it was easy. "Bothered Pock, went for a run. What did you get up to without me?"

The somehow living bit-creature in Historia's hand waved. "Not a lot." Historia shifted slightly on the bench, putting their knees within a hairsbreadth of touching. Ymir could feel them both watching the splice of space, and it brought some very vivid memories back. "My life's pretty boring without you."

Was that flirting or just the truth? Both?

"I guess I should find more excuses to stick around, then," Ymir said.

They were sitting too close for the kind of eye contact that brought on. Ymir tried not to look at Historia's cheek. Barely any of the wing left, glitter lurking invisibly, and it gave her a thrill that went down to her toes.

Historia looked at Ymir, and Ymir could see stars in her eyes.

"You should," she said.


	14. Chapter 14

Finding more excuses after several weeks of pulling every one she could out of a hat wasn't as simple as it sounded. Lunch, sure, and several days in the usual prep table had been gracefully overtaken by Ymir and people Ymir put up with. Pieck and Porco thought hanging out with Historia was a spectator sport, and Connie and Sasha had invited themselves when they saw an opening, because that's what they did.

Reiner bench pressing both of them wasn't the mood-setter Ymir was looking for, but time together was time together, and they shared zero classes. Lunch and after school. Such were the options, and neither worked great for talking about feelings. Ymir didn't even want to talk about feelings.

"Yet somehow, you keep finding a way," Pieck had said in the wake of one of Ymir's light jogging sessions.

"More like you and Pock keep bringing it up," was Ymir's retort.

What she really needed was some time alone with Historia that didn't leave them both putting up with crap and people they weren't in the mood for.

"That's called a date," Porco had said, head slumped in his pillow while he stopped bothering with keeping his eyes open. Staying up past curfew was a trick his body had somehow never learned. In the bed on the other side of the room, slightly more awake, Marcel had supplied the similarly helpful comment of, "You two text every night. You can't talk to her then?"

The people in her life failed at being remotely helpful with this, and she hoped they realized that. She'd told Pieck as much. Pieck, being Pieck, hadn't cared.

"If you want to kiss her again, your mouth is the one that needs to put in the work." She'd smiled, batting her eyes passively. "I hear you had some trouble with that the first time. Think of this as a much needed learning experience."

Ymir's friends were horrible people with not an ounce of compassion attributed to their combined presence.

The fucking problem, which none of them seemed to get, was that being around Historia made her happy. She liked watching her play games on her phone and teasing her about her jackass parents. She liked having someone around who listened to her bitch about her day. She liked how Historia told her she was being a dick while she squeezed her hand.

She liked the stupid, everyday being together enough that she wasn't actually thinking about kissing her every second of the day, and bringing that up would grind it to a halt, and the only grinding she wanted to do was with Historia.

But with feelings now.

She'd been pretty upfront about the parts that didn't take feelings. The new addition was different, and.

Just and.

Completing that thought was probably the first step to convincing Historia that making out needed to enter their socializing mix. With Ymir being such a catch, it would probably be the only step, but it was a step that kept not fucking happening for reasons of who the fuck knows.

A lifetime of watching other people screw up their feelings and laughing about it said that Ymir was probably the fuck who knew.

So she took up walking Historia to her car after cheerleading practice and thought about completely fucking over the warm glow that had decided it lived in her chest by talking about wanting the warm glow to be a real, tangible thing with labels and anniversaries.

Historia was fine with Ymir hitting her up for sex and breaking into lockers. Ymir asking her to spend the rest of her life with her was something else, also moving pathetically fast and probably creepy. Too bad that was the only way she could think of saying it, so sad, maybe they'd conveniently trip into each other in a secluded space and Historia would temporarily gain five inches of height so they could just accidentally make out and never talk about it.

Late Friday afternoon, as they walked to the hellspot of asphalt that contained Historia's driver, that still hadn't happened. Ymir was shocked. Truly. Shocked.

Sweeping one of the borrowed school towels through her sweat-tousled hair, Ymir struck up some conversation that kept her from thinking about the way Historia looked at her when she did that. "So why the cheerleading?"

"PE credit?"

Another thing Ymir liked about Historia. It was really easy to figure out where to dig.

"Nice try, but you like PE."

Historia was trying not to smile. She had to try now. "How would you know? My PE years weren't at this school."

"Sure, and the fact that you sulk hard enough to bring down thunderclouds whenever your coach cuts practice short doesn't say anything at all about what you like to do with your body," Ymir said. "You never complain about the crap choreography because you get to do flips. You've got jock written all over your prep face."

Historia's shoulder dug into Ymir's side. "The choreography isn't that bad."

"If you cared at all you wouldn't be able to say that." Ymir casually dropped her arm down and around Historia. A quick sight check confirmed she was okay with it. As did the small arm snaking across her back. "So," Ymir continued, stars and lightning and all things frightening lighting up her world, "why did the girl with no cheer pick leading that charge?"

Historia took an exaggeratingly long time feeding her Tamagotchi as the parking lot crept closer.

"Don't tell me it was the cute girls in skirts."

"Jealous?" Historia drawled.

"Please," Ymir said. "They've got nothing on me."

Historia bit her lip and gave the parts of Ymir's body she wasn't glued to a thriceover. Ymir's knees, a little worn out from running, weakened, and Historia's arm around her waist turned into a weirdly stable anchor.

"If you don't give me an answer now I'll just bug you all night," Ymir said. Nary a choked word in hearing.

Reaching the loading zone section of the sidewalk, Historia stopped. Racing to join Ralph or Sannes and leave Ymir behind was real low on the priority list. "Frieda," she said.

"Your sis—?"

"Historia!"

Ymir still, despite Hannah's token efforts, got the track team all over her ass about joining up. She had amazing legs, and everyone wanted them. She was also just plain faster than everyone on the team. Pieck had a passive aggressive stopwatch reading to prove it.

Historia was frozen stiffer than a popsicle. In a fraction of time unobservable by humans later, she had vanished from Ymir's side and left several Olympic records in smithereens.

"Frieda!"

All that was visible of her was a tiny blonde cannonball plunging into a human who would have been dubbed stunning in any other company.

Plus that smile.

Holy shit that smile.

Ymir almost forgot to miss holding her when Historia was smiling like that. She was hugging the tall young lady (Ymir had never actually met anyone before who fit the term, but Frieda was a _lady_ , and not knowing her well enough to determine that wasn't enough to invalidate the description) with a strength usually reserved for repressed homicidal urges, and she was smiling. Really smiling. With light and sunshine spilling out of her face like the radiance of the universe was trapped up inside her.

The sister was hugging her back maybe half as tightly, but no less happily, because there was no way to be in the presence of that smile, to _cause_ that smile, without some of it rubbing off.

"There you are! How was practice?"

Ymir didn't think Historia had ever cared less about cheerleading in her life.

"It… it was good! What—when did you get here?"

Frieda stroked several stray hairs back behind Historia's ear, looking down at her like they were sharing a secret. "Just now," she said. "What do you think, a good surprise?"

"Yes! I—yes, Frieda, it's…" Historia had the same level of words to put to the situation that Ymir did. She went with hugging her sister some more instead. Still with the smiling.

Ymir stood in the background like a forgotten stagehand and couldn't even mind.

Only she was a little less than wholly forgotten. Frieda's sugary sweet teddy bear affection sharpened over Historia's head. They had the same eyes, but this pair hadn't had weeks of being won over with charm and good looks.

Ymir had a very dark hunch, and very little evidence against it.

"Who's this?" Frieda asked lightly.

It was a heavy compliment, Ymir knew, that Historia instantly broke her hug enough to look back at Ymir. She didn't lose the smile when she did. If anything it brightened. Ymir didn't think she felt her heart anymore. Mush didn't have nerve endings.

"This," Historia said, with all the significance she'd skipped for the last family meet and greet, "is Ymir."

"Oh," Frieda said benignly. "The same Ymir you brought to Dad's party?"

Historia's smile evaporated.

Ymir's hunch started to feel a little more like fact.

She had only met Historia's parents once. If a second time came up, she didn't see it ending without a murder, and the only thing sparing Frieda at the moment was the streak of overprotectiveness lacing the hammer of judgment she was throwing Ymir's way.

"That's me," Ymir said. There were worse introductions. Better, too, but she was guessing Mama and Papa Reiss had already screwed her on that front.

Frieda smiled congenially at her. You know, like how mother bears bared their teeth before they disemboweled whatever previously living thing was unfortunate enough to step near their cub. "You must be good friends," she said.

It was bait on a devilish hook, and Ymir wasn't going to be able to help the swallow.

Historia beat her to it.

It could have happened in slow motion. In a movie reenactment, it would have, and missed out on the stumbling garble that came from Historia saying the words faster than she had time to think about them.

Before Ymir could even think about tactics, in a second of combusting defiance, what tripped out of Historia's mouth in front of her shiny, sparkly paragon of a sister who would accept nothing less was, "Ymir's my girlfriend."

…

So, the obvious: No, she was not.

The other obvious, stashed between Frieda's good-natured, lying, happy exclamation of surprise and Historia's rapidly paling face:

Holy fuck that so needed to change.


	15. Chapter 15

_AN: Hey guys, sorry about the delay. I reached the end of my backlog and decided to take a small break. Thank you all so much for the kind words, and I hope you continue to enjoy the fic!_

* * *

 _ur sister wants to kill me_

 ** _She does not  
Probably  
Mostly_**

 _a+ reassurance  
she was imagining my pelt on her wall_

 ** _Frieda doesn't believe in animal cruelty_**

 _r u calling me an animal_

 ** _[…]_**  
 _ **[…]**_  
 _ **Yes**_

 _worst fake girlfriend ever_

 ** _You've had others?_**

 _[…]  
jealous?_

"Can't you do this in your room?"

"Hm?" Ymir watched the series of flustered dots as Historia's numerous attempts to concoct a response were left unscathed by the vacuum of cyberspace. An unamused smiley finally made its way through, and Ymir's every carpal felt ready to jump through her skin and do a tap dance on the phone screen.

 _cop-out. new category of worst achieved until u give me my thousand words_

Resident joy sink, Porco, was sprawled out on his bed, glaring down at her and her happiness while he was stuck with him and his math homework. "Some of us are trying to work."

A […] later, a very long succession of smileys, very few of them earning that designation, popped to digital life. Ymir's face, the nearest thing actually worthy of a prancy title like that, was sore, and was going to keep being sore, because _this girl_ what the fuck.

Pock practically snarled in disgust, noisily turning a page there was no way he'd need to turn unless he was exaggerating his distraction. Like a poser.

"No one's stopping you from earning that D."

His bed squeaked, turning his breathless indignation audible in one fell swoop. "You," he said, "keep _giggling_."

Ymir was very tempted to lower her phone to match the dramatic pause that was worthy of. But then the glare of Marcel's lamp would block off the happy dots sauntering across the screen.

 _pock is casting aspersions on my character  
ur Worst crown is overtaken_

"I do not giggle."

 ** _He isn't your girlfriend.  
What character, btw?_**

Ymir found a middle finger emoji. Maybe tittered softly.

 _reinstated_

"Don't you have homework?" Porco said, being the good boy he was and modulating his volume for the obvious handicap of her ears being the impossible distance of a whole foot away from his big mouth.

"Finished it."

Porco tilted his head so he was looking over her shoulder. "You can't already be done with your homework. You've been chatting with her nonstop."

"I am an efficient multitasker," Ymir said.

"Bullshit."

"You talk to all the girls like this?"

Porco abandoned his flimsy pretense of making progress and rolled on his back. He was making his thinking silence. On the other side of the room, somehow minding his own business, Marcel casually glanced over, joining in on the spectator sport of Imminent Pock Explosions.

"It really doesn't bother you that she keeps using you?"

Ymir dropped her hands to her lap and gently bashed her head against Porco's comforter. "Wow, are we really doing this again?"

"Yes, we're doing this again," Porco snapped.

Ymir looked over at Marcel. Marcel, who was smiling like a cuddly marshmallow, looked down at his homework, which he'd somehow had zero problem doing while Ymir chatted up a hot girl. Typical older brother diplomacy check. Nerd.

"She didn't even ask you, she just introduced you to her sister as your girlfriend. You made a deal for the party, but nothing after. She drags you into this stuff without even thinking about your feelings." He stopped dramatically. "Which you _have_ , even if you're too much of a baby to tell her. She's yanking you around all over the place."

"That's what he said."

Porco growled and his bed squeaked again as he twisted around on it. "Marcel, would you talk some sense into her?"

Ymir rolled her eyes and went back to her phone, where a person she liked was talking to her.

 ** _What does that make you?_**

 _the best obv_

"Porco," Marcel said in his peacemaker voice, "Ymir gets to decide for herself what she wants out of a relationship."

"She's decided she's okay being some dead-eyed rich girl's— _girl toy_ because it's easier than talking to her!"

 ** _[…]  
_ _True._**

Ymir's chest was leaking warmth and whenever she and Historia finally got to it, her straining facial muscles were going to be a boon on both their houses.

"Hey Pock?" she said, interrupting the keen minded spluttering sure to ensue.

"What," he said, in his typical voice of understanding.

Ymir stood up, holding the glowing beacon of Hallmark cards everywhere close. "Listen to your big brother, and don't forget to hold his hand when you cross the street." She ruffled Porco's hair to great squawking and bumped fists with Marcel on her way out of their bedroom. Paying a bit more attention to the word singing her soul out into open water than either of them.

 _crown lost again  
current rank: subpar fake girlfriend_

* * *

As Porco had diligently surmised, Ymir had a pretty good texting train going with Historia, and its only stops were curfew and sexless bodily functions. Whatever he thought he knew about their thing, life had been nothing but up since the second they'd jumped on lying to one of the only family members Historia liked. All of one time, but the implication was that many more times would come up.

Kenny had kept himself to one comment a day on how Ymir's hands would stick like that if she didn't put her phone down once in a while.

Pieck's one and only statement was that it was cute how couples took up each other's hobbies. She hadn't directed the statement at anyone in particular. Ymir just happened to be in the room, and Pieck just happened to calmly paint an imaginary bullseye on her chest.

Ymir, balancing a pitcher of water over her glass as she checked for new messages, would have told them both to fuck off, but the other figurative arrow through her chest cavity was putting her in a more mellow place than she was used to.

Mellow enough that she did not fucking care that it was after dinner for both of them and Historia hadn't made a peep tonight.

"If you destroy that thing, you're not getting a new one," Kenny said, walking by and snatching up the pitcher for his own glass. "What'd it do, eat your homework?"

Ymir smoothed out her scowl at the blank screen. It worked less well when Kenny was in the room, inspiring further scowls. "Just waiting on a text."

"Waiting on a mountain of texts, more like." Kenny didn't glance at the screen, but why would he. He'd probably figured out every pixel of content on it from the next room over before saying anything. "That girl of yours does need sleep."

A lot of things weren't worth the dignity of a response, but Ymir was big on distributing dignity to the less fortunate. "Most people prefer not to sleep while the sun is still out."

"You get oddballs everywhere," Kenny said. Looking straight at her.

Ymir shrugged with all the borrowed aggression of the misunderstood teenager he was waiting on. "If you're trying to dispense fatherly advice, you'll need to be less vague."

"No advice," Kenny said, sipping his water. "But you'd do well not to sulk every time your lady friend can't spare you a moment. Your face will stick like that, and it drives your brother spare."

It was not physically possible to live a life that wouldn't cause Porco massive distress, and truthfully the best thing Ymir had ever done for him was hand out that distress in doses he could manage without the veins in his forehead erupting in full horror movie gore and glory, and Pseudo Dad's lack of interest in that didn't change the facts, but—

Ymir's phone vibrated, halting all conceivable conversation angles. Like how that had totally been advice.

 ** _Ypu don't have to_**

The doorbell rang.

Ymir would have bolted from the kitchen, but Kenny caught her by the scruff of her shirt, sighing with none of the patience he claimed to have with them to the social worker, and half-lifting her down the hall to the front door.

"I'll get that for you," he said, walking very directly in front of her feet.

He strode over the carpet without any care, deliberately slow for a man whose main mission in life when someone was at his doorstep was to discourage them from being anywhere near it ever again. Also just slow. Ymir had seen Pieck move faster on her bad days.

He stepped in front of the door, adjusting the vest he thought was okay to wear on a day to day basis. Flicking lint from one of the shoulders. Ymir didn't give him the satisfaction of complaining. He could hand her all the rope to hang herself he wanted; something around a decade of experience and common sense told her not to tie it around her neck. She stood politely behind him and waited for the power play to fuck off.

He turned the knob and opened the door a crack.

Ymir knew the old man better than he wanted her to. She caught the flurry of surprise on his face before it cleared and he abruptly opened the door all the way.

Historia wasn't standing on the porch.

Frieda was.

She had a very kind face for a demon who was expressly willing to maul Ymir's off. The same surprise that had done a Houdini on Kenny's face stayed on hers a little longer, but she neatly squared it away when she spotted Ymir. Dressed to the nines in homey mom fashion, she bared her teeth in what lesser mortals would describe as a smile.

"You must be Ymir's guardian," Frieda said at Kenny. With the manners to look at him when she said it, even though all of her ill psychic will was placed squarely in one direction.

"Foster father," Kenny said, pulling Ymir forward to clap her shoulder. "What do you want with my kid, Frieda?"

A real smile came out, distressingly reminiscent of the one Ymir had seen Historia give her sister. "We—Historia and I—were in the area for dinner, and thought we'd wrap it up with some dessert. With Ymir so close by, it seemed like a good chance for the girls to spend some time together."

Not one to argue with the lady laying the world at her feet, Ymir did not, out loud, question why in the fuck Frieda knew where she lived. Or why Frieda was doing a terrible job at pretending she didn't know Kenny, rivaled only by Kenny not giving a damn about hiding that.

She was also going to ignore how a woman who hated her was dragging her off for an interrogation disguised as a supervised date. Just for grins, she'd add Historia's typoed warning to that list.

"Sounds like a plan," Ymir said. "What do you say, pops?"

Kenny gave her a very unimpressed look under the lazy smile he put on like a new hat. To Frieda, he said, "You'll see to it that she's home at a reasonable hour?"

"Naturally," Frieda said. Her teeth still full of sunshine and fangs.

Kenny wasn't one for airs unless it gave him something fun to do, and like most parents, torturing his brats fell into that category. He made a show of looking Ymir up and down while Ymir stood like an obedient statue in the doorway. With a careless shrug, he thumped Ymir's back, pushing her out the front door. "Go have your fun. Don't cause her any trouble." His grin dropped with the look he shot Frieda. "That goes double for you, darling."

Frieda smiled and, in all likelihood, lied. "I wouldn't dream of it."

No, she'd just show up in the middle of the night to sweep Ymir away from the safety of her house with promises of spending time with a pretty girl.

If vampires turned out to exist, Ymir's limited funds were on the Reiss family. Finally, a grounded explanation for Historia's unnatural beauty. At least she'd die happy. Assuming Frieda didn't interrupt and just cut to the chase herself.

Breaking etiquette in the spirit of sanity, Ymir waved Kenny a goodbye and hopped down the front steps a bit ahead of Frieda, light as a feather and as condemned as the dead bird it came off. The black car by the curb had tinted windows, and even the setting sun looked moody reflected off it.

Definitely Historia's car.

"You two can share the backseat," Frieda called out, unlocking the vehicle.

Ymir skipped to the nearest door, opening it with as much of a flourish as hyper modern car door hinges allowed. The seat behind the driver was empty. The seat next to it, however…

Historia whole body was cringing, and her phone was decisively off under the deeply apologetic look etched into her face. Her hair was down, drapes of it cascading over the hand she was holding to her forehead. She was wearing another skirt. The seatbelt had it pulled up.

As renaissance regretful and gorgeous as she looked, Ymir could see the tension in her shoulders drop when they made blissful, heavenly eye contact.

"Heard you were in the neighborhood," Ymir said. A little breathlessly. Going from zero to skipping down a whole sidewalk was nothing to sneeze at.

Historia's mouth curled up with her spine, rearranging herself into the posture all her nannies had wet dreams about. Heavy on the relatable there, though Ymir had the taste to care more about the subject than the blocking.

"Sorry," she said. Perfect blues not even a little sorry anymore.

"Sure you are."

"I meant it. You don't have to if you don't—"

Frieda's door opened, and she eased into her seat with the practiced serenity of someone who didn't have any moral qualms about eavesdropping.

Ymir grinned, and didn't take Frieda up on the offered eye contact in her rearview mirror. "What kind of girlfriend would I be if I turned down time with you?"

A genuine, real, that-feel-when-you-must-be-dead-to-get-this-up-and-personal-with-an-angel smile flashed by Historia's lips, and Ymir quashed the urge to kiss her silly. Because Frieda was there. That made it weird.

There and expecting them to be girlfriends.

Ymir fastened her seatbelt, and before she had a chance to think enough to talk herself out of it, leaned across the middle seat and dotted her lips to Historia's cheek.

Her range was off. She came in too hard and then skin was too soft and she lingered too long. She needed practice. Preferably a lot. _But_.

When she pulled back, a rosy sunset red dusted Historia's smile.

Up front, Frieda cleared her throat. "So Ymir. Are you enjoying school?"

While Ymir crafted her answer about how she was a perfect student with perfect grades and look how shiny and great I am for your baby sister, Historia's hand crept over the space between them and found hers. Ymir laced their fingers together without even a thought, and Historia's grip tightened on hers while her phone slipped to her seat.

* * *

By the time Frieda had placed the two of them in a comfy booth across from her, ice cream elegantly arranged in cardboard cups with bright plastic spoons sticking out, Ymir thought she had the lay of the land.

Frieda did not buy their story even a little.

"You two met when Ymir was helping her brother with a locker problem, is that right?"

Smile, smile.

Death knives launched from her eyes.

The sad part was that everything Ymir had contributed to the conversation was true. She was leaving out all the unrestrained lust and cutting class, but she'd painted a masterstroke backdrop for their supposed romance.

Frieda was still watching her with all the friendliness of a mother hawk.

The more painfully sad part was that the hand-holding and cheek kisses and general cuddliness they were playing up was doing nothing to change Frieda's base expression. One of the only people in the world Historia would smile for, and copious amounts of whatever this all was that they were doing wasn't making them look convincing to her.

They were given thirty seconds alone when she got up for extra napkins. Ymir used them.

"She's already reserved the unmarked plot of dirt where she's digging my grave," she said, sticking her spoon deeper into her triple scoop deluxe for emphasis.

"Our family hasn't done that since our great-great-grandfather got caught," Historia said. Switching between staring at her melting scoop of ice cream and staring at her sister. Ymir wanted in on that rotation.

She took a questing lick of her spoon. "Do you ever stop and think that most people can't name relatives who got in trouble for burying the corpses of their enemies?"

Historia shrugged. "Grandpa Karl had a drinking problem. And he liked gardening."

"So he got into bar fights and dug the losers' graves?"

"Yes."

"Historia?" Ymir said.

"Yes?"

"Do you have any concrete reasons for why I shouldn't worry about your sister murdering me? That will actually make that sound like the dramatization we all thought it was?"

Historia rolled her eyes and let her head fall to Ymir's shoulder. Some of her hair was still tumbling over hers. It did distracting and unfair things to Ymir's train of thought, which was impressive when the train was stopped in the middle of Oddly Specific Deaths Station.

"Frieda's nice," Historia said.

"Thank you, Historia," Frieda said, plopping into her side of the booth with a tower of napkins that the entire city's bird population would be making nests of for weeks. She popped a scoop of her ice cream into her mouth with relish. She'd ordered gummy bears on hers. "I'd say the same about both of you, but I'm afraid I still don't know your girlfriend that well."

Frieda had called Ymir Historia's girlfriend twelve times so far. The expanding balloon of how incredible that was to hear kept being popped by the daggers Frieda was shooting at her.

Historia had done what she could to play mediator, but she clearly had no idea how she was supposed to get her much adored big sister to back the fuck off. "Ymir's nice," she said, her head stiffening on Ymir's shoulder. "She's just crass about it."

Frieda smiled understandingly. "Is she, now?"

The only convenient part about Frieda being determined to hate her was that Ymir didn't have to bother trying to win her over with convoluted lies of better character. "Except for the part about me being nice," she said.

Item seventeen on the inconvenience list was Historia actually trying. She pulled her head away so that the full power of her incandescent gaze was peeling back the layers around Ymir's heart.

There was maybe one sheet of paper left in the blockade. Each second of physical contact was another ripped corner.

"Ymir walks her foster brothers home from school every day. She helps the drama club with their costumes and memorizes all their scripts so they always have an understudy." Historia looked at her sister. "She also came to Father's party to keep me company." Her hair glittered with the uncertain turn Historia made back Ymir's way. "She—she's a very considerate person."

Paper shredded, it was but a very fucking dead memory.

How Frieda would take that mattered. She was Historia's one liked family member. Besides the cult uncle. A sincere appeal from a soul of pristine beauty was going to change something, and Ymir was trying to avoid giving the vampire an invite.

She scooped her ice cream into her mouth without tasting it, freezing pain cringing her eyes closed a second later. So she wasn't technically looking at the floor instead of Historia. She was compiling a thorough report on her eyelids for reason of needing to document every body part in contact with her heart before its inevitable decimation.

There wasn't a ring in the world that would impress someone with as much money as Historia had. Ymir would have to find something else. Her soul sounded like a great substitute at the moment, and if Historia really suffered the lack of good sense that let her believe everything she just said—hell, maybe she'd accept that.

"Oh, that's right," Frieda said. "You were Ophelia in the school play last year, weren't you?"

"Only for a few shows," Ymir said, deciding looking over at Frieda counted as a safe activity for the moment. Historia's head hadn't moved back to her shoulder.

"I remember. Historia was kind enough to suggest tickets when I stopped by for my visit." Frieda twirled her spoon in her hand, the lights catching the plastic's shine. "She hasn't enjoyed Shakespeare since my old friend Willy tried to convert her, so it was a pleasant surprise. Your performance only added to that."

That sounded like a real compliment. Genuine niceness as a whetstone for those fangs of hers. Ymir could see Historia's shoulders relax in her peripheral. Hers didn't. She shrugged. "I just do what the script tells me."

"Very well, at that," Frieda said kindly. "You're quite the actress. Are there any other roles you're looking forward to, besides your current one?"

…

Historia snapped back to sitting rigidly next to Ymir. Ymir silently wished for the double joints needed to kick herself. Well fucking played. Nice smile, diabolical intentions all over her everything, and Ymir still stepped right into it.

Frieda didn't even give her some sort of lifeline of acting like she was dialed into the subtext dripping from her claws. She looked like the sort of mom they used for herpes pamphlet photo shoots. Benignly not giving a fuck with teeth as white as snow.

"I like my current gig," Ymir said. Fuck, was she blushing? That pressure in the back of her head said blush imminent if not already there, sounding out a death knell for her credibility while Frieda readied a shovel. "I could see holding on to it for a while."

A glimmer of passing that test was squashed under Frieda's heel. "It pays that well?"

Before Ymir could unpack _that_ , Historia's hand slapped the table and she rose to her feet like an avenging angel, her brilliant hair a golden halo of wrath. " _Frieda._ "

For a very faint moment of humanity, Frieda looked like the guilty, overly concerned sister Historia deemed worthy of having access to her Facebook page. She lowered her spoonful of gummy bears.

Ymir didn't give her a chance to apologize. She slipped her hand over Historia's.

"Yeah," she said, definitely fucking blushing, and definitely not fucking blinking as she took on Frieda's gaze. "It pays great."

* * *

"I am so sorry."

"Could you not?"

Historia couldn't not. "I shouldn't have let her suggest—"

Ymir dropped their linked hands to wrap her arm around Historia's shoulder, which shut her up very quickly. "You're the one who told me to spend more time with you. Don't backtrack now."

Historia sighed and let herself be pulled into Ymir's side. For the five more steps they had until Ymir was safely back on her front porch, all vital organs intact except maybe the pumping chest one. Historia had been politely instructed to walk Ymir to her door.

"Sorry," she muttered again.

Ymir had been politely instructed to be the perfect girlfriend in a feat of nonverbal communication that most mimes couldn't match. Out loud, Frieda had told her to have a good night. And to say hi to her foster father.

There was a story there, and it probably involved more dead bodies.

They reached the door.

The car, parked not so far away, had the perfect vantage point of the door.

Frieda struck her as the sort of person who watched chick flicks in bulk. She knew this was where girlfriends would be expected to kiss. Ymir knew this was where girlfriends would be expected to kiss. Even Historia probably knew this was where girlfriends would be expected to kiss.

Ymir's arm fell from Historia's shoulder.

Historia took a halfhearted step away.

They didn't have a working porch light. It had taken a football to the bulb.

That didn't mean much. Ymir had good night vision, and Historia lit up the world anyway.

Historia took another step back, sliding her designer shoes over the concrete. Her head matched it with an uncommitted tilt forward before she reeled herself in.

She wasn't looking at Ymir.

They could just say good night like good little girls and blame the awkward on Frieda being a voyeuristic creep.

"She's really the sister you like, huh?"

Historia didn't take another step back. She did frown, but her jaw unclenched a little. Pieck was right. She had great bone structure. "She cares. Most people don't." Her eyes flitted up to Ymir's for a moment. "She isn't—I haven't—I don't think she knows the rules for…" she wobbled her hand in the air between them.

There was a little too much of it.

Ymir's tongue felt like lead. It was too big for her mouth, and there were thoughts about setting up a rent plan elsewhere, but mostly her pulse was starting to thump in her temples. Distractingly.

"What are the rules?" she asked. Through an atmosphere of cotton, since her ears were joining the malfunctioning club.

Historia's eyes snapped to Ymir's and stayed put. "For her?"

Ymir shrugged a shoulder.

Historia took a step closer. "For…" Her body swayed in the gap her planted feet left. "Us?"

Her eyes dropped an inch before coming back. They had gone dark, again. Ocean stared into Ymir, holding the promising lie of quenching her thirst with a sip, but there was no magnetic pull of the moon to bring it closer.

She hadn't held off last time. Ymir's brain was all fog and no lighthouse, drowning in waves she couldn't touch, but she remembered that. She hadn't been able to move. There was nothing, and then softness, and warmth, and she still hadn't been able to move.

Of course Historia wasn't going to go for that again.

Ymir was stiff and clumsy and there was no way she was going to do it right, and then Historia would have a new reason not to try, and that would ruin everything a million times more than being a wuss and not moving, and—

Ymir had _put_ it there. That hesitation.

This beautiful, reckless girl who never thought twice about anything and had a smile like the sun when someone else parted the clouds, and there was no way she was going to kiss Ymir when Ymir had thrown several new ones into the sky, and _fuck that noise_.

Ymir dipped down and Historia jerked forward, both of them tumbling into each other with an awkward bump of noses and teeth.

And warmth. That same warmth.

They were both very, very still for a moment, and Ymir almost opened her eyes to check it was all real. Then, slowly, their lips discovered each other without a clash. Just electrifying sparks that rolled down Ymir's spine and heated her to the core.

Ymir's hands found Historia's waist, pulling her close enough for their legs to brush. The kiss didn't break, even while Historia's hands snaked clumsily around her neck to keep her balance, which had become their balance, and Ymir's back was against the door, and those hands were in her hair and tugging, and all Ymir could do was kiss back and be swept away.

Historia was shorter. Control fell into her hands with Ymir. She drew her in so deeply, parched softness gliding over Ymir's mouth as the keening request for touch turned into a demand, collapsing Ymir's knees and melting her into something that couldn't be nothing when the entire cosmos was erupting to life behind her eyelids.

A brief, agonizing separation gasped between them, then Historia was back, with hot and eager pecks that Ymir returned with vigor, everything that wasn't her lips on Historia's feeling fake and insubstantial. There was her, and Historia, and an endless fall that began over and over with every kiss, drowning and flying all at once, one human lifeline keeping her in place.

Ymir kissed her, and didn't think she would ever, _ever_ stop—

 _BEEEEEEEEP_

They were too entangled to trip apart, but Historia definitely tried, and only all of Ymir's brain power being directed at holding on to her stopped her from cracking her skull open.

Breathless, wide-eyed, and as discombobulated as two people who hadn't dodged a concussion, Ymir and Historia stared at each other.

 _BEEP_

Historia jumped, and her hands dropped out of Ymir's hair, and the rest of her dropped out of the most essential of the five senses with an abruptness that was going to give Ymir thoracic whiplash.

Frazzled and halfway undone, Historia turned and waved at her sister's car. Which was still there.

Some kind of reality that wasn't Historia kissing her started to leak back. Ymir didn't care for it, and a less concussed version of her would have said fuck it and pulled Historia back in for another round.

Historia took a very shaky breath, and turned back to Ymir.

Naked want was in her eyes, and Ymir slid further down the door.

"I'll—" Historia cleared her throat. "I'll see you at school."

Ymir maybe managed to get the intended nod off.

Historia nodded back like it was the only thing she remembered how to do.

"Thanks," she added.

It took a minute for her to figure out that was her cue to go back into the car. Ymir was fuzzy on the details of why. The tinted windows didn't let her see Frieda, which was fine. When Historia clambered in, still mostly looking at Ymir, it became less fine.

Ymir watched the car leave.

The taillights were gone. She was still on the porch, and her legs were still jelly.

She pulled out her phone.

After a long pause, she tapped out real human words.

 _best fake girlfriend?_

There wasn't even a second of delay before her phone buzzed the reply.

 ** _Best._**


End file.
